Jana Boková: Bye Bye Shanghai
Czech film director Jana Boková lives in Buenos Aires, in a chosen exile as many of the friends she visits in this film about what exile means and about whether you can return and find your roots and yourself at the place that you come from. As a theme it is very interesting, unfortunately you can not say the same about the film, which has a feel of repetition. Not that the characters are not interesting, they are, at least some of them, but the director is not able to convey an interesting atmosphere or an intensity that could have made the film a strong document. For that, the film would have needed a less sketchy and loose structure, less unimportant café talks, a drastic cut out of loads of touristic images from Paris and much more. Plus the stressing of some points like the fine one with the man, who was in Paris in 1968, saw and took part in the riots but hurried around to tell the French revolutionaries that they should definitely NOT think, as many did, that things were better in the communist countries.
Czech Republic, 1h 50 mins., 2008
