The Story of Water Sprite
3 min Trailer, German
52 min, non-fiction, digi Beta
official selection at the following festivals:
- World Premiere at Cronograf International Documentary Film Festival, Chisinau, Moldova, June 2006
- DaKINO International Film Festival, Bucharest, Romania, November 2006
- Pumelo Independent Film Festival, Mumbai, India, February 2007
- 9th Thessaloniki International DocMarket, Greece, March 2007
- ‘Best Short Documentary’ in the BAC 41st International Film and Video Festival at Brooklyn Museum, New York City, USA, May 2007, with special recognition for Excellence in Editing and Cinematography
- Bluegrass Independent Film Festival, La Grange, USA, September 2007
- Dialëktus, European Documentary and Anthropological Film Festival Budapest, Hungarian, March 2008
- One World, International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival Prague, Czech Republic, March 2008
Director: Thomas Büsch/Sabine Küper
Script: Sabine Küper, Antonin Mares
With Antonin Mares and Frantisek Dockal
Photography: Michal Skoda, Sabine Küper
Editing: Thomas Büsch
Translation: Antonin Mares, Dean Moore
Production Assistent: Frantisek Dockal
Music: Bardo Henning played by Bardomaniacs
Bardo Henning
Bettina Wauschke
Andreas Kohlmann
Production: Thomas Büsch/Sabine Küper, Berlin
Co–Production: TV Morava s.r.o., Olomouc
Supported by Cesko-Nemeckého Fondu Budoucnosti, Prague
Original Language: Czech and German
Subtitled: English
Voice off: English
Antonin Mares is living in Munich as a writer and translator. After escaping from Czech Republic in 1968 he had lost contact to his homeland for twenty years. In the Nineties he discovered, that Czech Republic is not any more the country he had left as a seventeen year old. The attempts to reconnect are lasting until today.
In 1997 there was a big flood in Morava, the part of Czech Republic, Antonin Mares is originally coming from. The natural catastrophe inspired him to write a short story called “The Water Sprite”. The experience of exile is transformed to a fairy tale in this narration.
The documentary features Antonin Mares on a journey through Czech Republic. Together with his nephew Frantisek he visits central locations of his narration “Water Sprite”. Slowly the connection between the fictional story and Mares biography appear. Beside uncle and nephew experience, that at the end of the journey they have connected to each other.
The element water is used as a central metaphor in the film. Floods, Venice, Water Sprite are symbols of the rebellious side of nature. Beyond the effects of historical developments on individual life-stories it stays uncontrollable and uncertain. Or as Mares notes: Water flows, you can‘t force it into a line, it evaporates and comes down next year at a place where I won‘t be.
Berlin/Istanbul/Olomouc 2006
