Jan Vosýnek↓

About the work

Geron

An absurd conversation between two actors of an experimental improvisation group - a grandson and a grandfather - scrutinising their spiritual heritage. The grandson responds to a moral crisis by burgling his grandfather‘s cottage. He perceives the act as a therapy – for himself as well as his family, as a process in which he plays the role of a thief - just as his grandpa used to be - and also as a gesture to start a family dialogue.

In his diploma work, Jan Vosýnek presents to the viewer a film combining the classic film-making approach with evidently improvised dialogues. The story takes place in a water company industrial site amid the woods of the Ore Mountain Range. At the screening, the grandson shows his grandfather a video of himself stealing from the cottage. Within improvisational sections, the actors are required to respond to five stimuli. Two cameramen and a sound engineer involved in the creation of the film participate in the dialogues, entering the scene and appearing in the footage.

In a mental map of connections and connotations used by Jan Vosýnek as the theoretical basis for his film, the individual statements are represented by and replaced with symbols that appear in the film. A famous Czech pastry known as “coffin” served with whipped cream represents the Czech phenomenon of the weekend and holiday use of countryside cottages, a plastic ladle filled with honey stands for the grandfather‘s stealing during the capitalist era, a wind power plant being a symbol for giving and accepting bribes in the same period.