Next Tuesday, 4 March, will see the world premiere of a new documentary, ‘EPOS 2.0’, telling the story of Epos, the iconic experimental photography group active in Normalization-era Czechoslovakia. The film will start at 8pm at Kino Art, and will be followed by a reception for the launch of ‘Nymfy a Rebelové’ (‘Nymphs and Rebels’), a new photography collection from Epos’s Jiří Horák.
Directed by Emanuele Ruggiero and António Pedro Nobre, the film tells the story of Epos: a group of Czechoslovak photographers—Jiří Horák, Rostislav Košťál, František Maršálek, and Petr Sikula—and their “theoretician” Ladislav Plch, who formed in 1967 and became influential in the 1970s. The film shows these artists 50 years later as they recreate some of their most famous photos in the same locations and, where possible, with the same people they photographed. Through dialogues with each other and the people they meet, they explain why each photo was chosen, its importance, and its historical significance.
According to Ruggiero, the film is not just a documentary about photography but also about the history and political context of the era. “The film explores how their work, inspired by the fashion and cinema of the French New Wave, portrayed the Czech “Big Beat generation” during the normalization period after the Warsaw Pact invasion,” he told Brno Daily. “The film combines archival photographic material with contemporary scenes of the photographers, their memories, and their experiences of political persecution, migration, and exile, as well as how their lives changed before the Velvet Revolution.”
The film features interviews and reenactments with all of the group except František Maršálek, who is no longer alive, and to whom the film is dedicated.
The premiere will screen at Kino Art at 8pm on Tuesday, 4 March. Tickets are available from the Kino Art website. The reception to launch Jiří Horák’s ‘Nymfy a Rebelove’, including projections from members of the Epos group, will start at 9pm.
Brno Daily is a media partner of ‘EPOS 2.0’.
