Programs

Abandoned Mystery

Abandoned Mystery is an interdisciplinary project exploring the phenomena of abandoned military sites in the Baltic Sea area. In cooperation with partners, the researchers organised field-trips to abandoned places in Russia, Lithuania, Latvia and Finland. This film is based on the expedition to Latvia between the 3rd and 6th of May, 2012. The researchers visited the former Soviet military centre in Irbene with the world’s eighth-largest radio telescope and the Libava fortress, the most expensive and ambitious project of the Czarist Russian army on the Baltic sea, taken over by the Third Reich and then the Soviets.

 

artistsIrigoyen Ramos Jon, Signe Pucena, Steinn Friðbjarnason Arnar, Dmitry Demidov, Katerina Cherevko, Fiona Flynn, Mindaugas Gapševičius, Evaldas Jansas
place_Neurčené město
tags
castIrigoyen Ramos Jon, Signe Pucena, Steinn Friðbjarnason Arnar, Dmitry Demidov, Katerina Cherevko, Fiona Flynn, Mindaugas Gapševičius, Evaldas Jansas
cameraEvaldas Jansas
soundAntanas Dombrovskij, Evaldas Jansas
editingEvaldas Jansas
interviewEvaldas Jansas
categoryPrograms
published2. 12. 2012
languageČesky / English
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Abandoned Mystery
Vít Soukup shot Old Mates and The Silver Trail (1993) as two parts of an imaginary television series. Both stories are introduced by a television announcer who, in a serious tone, presents a chaotic tangle of banal interpersonal intrigue, as was the custom before genre-based socialist television series. Old Malina comes to visit his resigned friend Drudge, who denounces the vanity of life as a former member of the “coyote” generation of the nineties, deconstructed by postmodernism.
“Our pseudo-lives were nothing but speech bubbles. We desecrated everything. […] We ground [it all] to dust,” says Vít Soukup as the pessimist Drudge in the series Old Mates. His approach to films was similar. He made works full of ironic references to high culture and low, and enjoyed using clichés in their raw state.