The first edition of the Unbreakable and Sacrificed festival took place from 10 to 12 November 2020 and presented films by Czech, Slovak and Polish filmmakers Olga Sommerová, Martin Vadas, Helena Třeštíková, Pavel Štingl, Kristina Vlachová, Arkadiusz Gołębiewski and many others. The Polish Institute in Prague was a partner of the first edition of the festival, which also presented several Polish films. All films, introductions and discussions were streamed online from BIO OKO. The recordings of the opening and closing ceremonies, all introductions and discussions for each film are also available free of charge on the festival's web portal. The films are also available here, either by linking to YouTube or to the Czech Television web portal. Even if you did not manage to watch the first edition of the festival online, it is possible to participate in this way afterwards. You can also listen to the podcasts we have prepared for the festival. Petr Blažek, Jan Kalous, Maciej Ruczaj present the origins of the festival and selected films.
Two awards are presented at the festival: the Guardian of Memory Award (which from this year takes the full name of the Jaroslava Jander Award, Guardian of Memory) and the Creator of Memory Award. The former was awarded in 2020 to documentary filmmaker Olga Sommerová for her lifetime achievement. The second prize for activities aimed at defending and upholding memory was awarded to Arkadiusz Gołębiewski, Polish director and director of the NNW Documentary Film Festival in Gdynia.
The second edition of the film festival took place from 10 to 14 November 2021. The programme of the first and final day took place in the House of the Pážat, which is currently being converted into the headquarters of the Twentieth Century Memorial Museum. Visitors were treated to a tour of the building, an exhibition, a concert, film screenings and discussions. From 11 to 13 November 2021, documentary films were screened at BIO OKO, as they were in 2020. The programme also included educational programmes for schools. A catalogue was published for festival visitors. The Creator of Memory Award went to Polish filmmaker Maciej Drygas, and the Jaroslava Jander Award for the Guardian of Memory went to Karel Strachota, director of One World in Schools.
The second year of the festival was created with the support of the Capital City of Prague. Prague and the Czech-Polish Forum. Partners of the festival were the Polish Institute in Prague, Czech Television, the National Film Archive, the Ticha Memorial and the Military Historical Institute.
The third edition of the film festival took place from 7 to 12 November 2022. The programme took place at BIO OKO and the Hybernská Campus. The programme also included educational programmes for schools. A catalogue was published for festival visitors.
A total of 31 films (including student films) and one composed programme (selected newsreels from 1942) were shown. Four of the 31 films were feature films. This year's edition was accompanied for the first time by a student competition, in which films from FAMU productions up to a maximum of 5 years old from their creation took part. A total of 8 films competed for the prize, including four short animated documentaries and four approximately hour-long documentaries. The thematic focus was on the history of the 20th century. The main prize went to director Haruna Honcoop for her experimental crossover documentary For Eternity - Relics of Socialist Era Architecture. The jury decided to award two more special mentions: to Jiří Strejcovský for his film Complex of an Epic, dealing with the story of Jiří Mucha's Slavic Epic, and to David Daenemark for his short animated film Staging No1948.
Another novelty was the accompanying seminars and workshops for students. There were five such programmes in total. As a kind of prelude to the festival, a professional seminar for archives and museum staff entitled Documentary Film in Museum Exhibitions was held on Monday 12 September 2022 in cooperation with the Faculty of Education of Charles University in Prague. Experts from Poland and the Czech Republic took part in this seminar. There was also a seminar held in cooperation with Czech Television entitled Between Fiction and Fact - History in Film, Documentary and News, which dealt with e.g. the limits of copyright licence in the processing of real events and many other topics. On Tuesday, 8 November 2022, a seminar by Petr Koura and Petr Blažek entitled Film Reflections on the Assassination of Heydrich took place at the Hybernská Campus - with examples from various films made on the subject of the attack on Heydrich across time and borders. The Museum has included two workshops for students in the festival programme: How Documentary Film is Made and New Trends in Documentary Filmmaking. Both of these workshops were attended by festival guests from Poland - filmmaker and NNW festival director Arkadiusz Gołębiewski and journalist Martin Wikɬo. About 60 students participated in these workshops. Other guests of the Unbreakable and Sacrificed festival were, for example, directors Olga Sommerová, Edita Mildažyté (Lithuania) and Anna Grusková (Slovakia) and documentary filmmaker and war reporter from Ukraine Snezhana Potapčuk.
The festival included three morning blocks of screenings for schools, during which six films were screened with an average attendance of 290 students per day / 2 screenings. The screenings were again this year accompanied by debates with invited directors and historians. The programme of the festival was complemented by the opening of the exhibition Christian Democrat JUDr. Bedřich Hostička (1914-1996), which took place on 7 November 2022 in the ambyte of the Monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. On the penultimate day of the festival, awards were presented. The second festival award, the Guardian of Memory - Jaroslava Janderová Award, intended for personalities who in various ways have long been trying to preserve historical memory, was given to underground filmmaker Petr Prokeš at the closing ceremony.
The third year of the festival was created with the support of the Capital City of Prague. Prague and the Czech-Polish Forum. Partners of the festival were the Polish Institute in Prague, Czech Television, the National Film Archive, the Ticha Memorial, the Military Historical Institute, Charles University and the Hybernská Campus.
- Unbreakable and Sacrificed 2020 Festival website
- Unbreakable and Sacrificed 2021 Festival website
- The website of the Unbreakable and Sacrificed 2022 Festival
- Unbreakable and Sacrificed 2021 Festival Catalogue
- Photo Gallery of the Unbreakable and Sacrificed 2020 Festival
- Photo Gallery of the Unbreakable and Sacrificed 2021 Festival