The Karamazovs

The Karamazovs is a film experiment by the Czech screenplay writer and director Petr Zelenka (Tiger Award for Knoflíkari, 1997) based on the adaptation for the stage of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov by the leading figure of Czechoslovak Nouvelle Vague, Evald Schorm, and excellently performed by Czech actors from the Dejvicke Theatre in Prague.
The story takes place in an industrial part of Poland. A group of people walk through a run-down steel mill; actors from a theatre in Prague, they have come here to take part in an alternative theatre festival. They are about to rehearse for a performance to be held in this space the next day. There are a few workers still on the job at the mill, the only living creatures left. They pay the actors little attention at first, pre-occupied with a personal tragedy: the day before, the son of a maintenance man fell from a catwalk and seriously injured his spine. Their interest is in his fate. Amid remnants of old machinery and old junk, the rehearsal begins…
According to the director himself, he wanted to do the impossible: to capture the elusive character of theatre in film. The result is a unique and unusual adaptation the like of which has never been seen before. (LC)

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