The 48 Hour Film Project, the world's largest timed film competition of its kind, is celebrating its 16th anniversary this year. The competition was held for the first time in 2001 in the American capital, Washington, with a single competing team. Gradually, however, this project became a cultural phenomenon and expanded to 3,000 films a year in 125 cities around the world. And these cities already include Prague, Brno and Bratislava. The Prague festival, which this year was already in its seventh year, took place over the weekend of 20-22. October 2017 in the premises of the famous music club Chapeau Rouge. And in order to find out how such a 48-hour festival actually goes, we decided to spend it with one of the 40 registered participants, the Slovak film team KEKS Production.
All competing teams will gather on Friday evening at the official opening of the festival, where they will draw their genre. There are usually two different genres to choose from. This year, we chose the genres Ryba na suchu and Family film, but we preferred Ryba na suchu, because it is closer to us," says Valentín Kozaňák, director of the team. "After selecting the genres, the mandatory criteria are read, which are uniform for all teams and must appear in each of the competing films. This time there was the obligatory character Martin Roop - an athlete, the obligatory prop butter and the obligatory sentence: I want to be alone. The film cannot be longer than 7 minutes," explains the experienced director. Experienced because he and his team have already participated in three festivals in Bratislava and two in Prague. Among those from Bratislava, KEKS even won several prizes. For example, for the best screenplay, the best camera, the best editing or the best used main character. Well, next year they are even thinking about participating in the festival in Brno, due to a change of environment, which is always a new inspiration, as cameraman and editor Jakub Chochuľa revealed. After the themes are drawn, all the teams move mostly to the environment where they then create, or to various restaurants and cafes in the city, where the basic story scenario is created. "The script is usually a joint work. In this regard, democracy rules in our team. Everyone can come up with an idea, every member of the team can comment on it. From the various ideas, the best one is then selected, which is further processed in the form of dialogues. The only thing that is certain is that the complete script must be ready by Saturday morning at the latest," as the co-author of the dialogues, Mariana Neumanová, explained to us. "Well, filming starts on Saturday. We usually do the exteriors first so that we can catch the daylight, and we leave the interiors for the evening. This year, for the film, we needed several shots from the city center, such as the subway, the square, the train station or the swimming pool. We filmed the interiors mainly in the underground catacombs right on the premises of our rented studio," adds lighting engineer Noro Mikláš. "On Sunday, the film is mainly edited, post-synchronization is done, music is recorded so that all the components of the film are in balance and harmonize together. That is mainly the work of our editor and director. We actors usually have peace at this time after two sleepless nights. Additional tension and adrenaline will only appear in the phase when the finished film is rendered so that we can hand it over to the festival organizers on time. This process is always quite lengthy and we can never predict exactly when it will end. So it happens to us that we run with the film race through the center of Prague in order to make it. This year, too, we handed it in only five minutes before the final deadline, i.e. five minutes past eight. The rules are pretty strict on this. Films that are submitted after the deadline are shown as part of the winner announcement ceremony, but the jury no longer evaluates them. And that is certainly a sad matter for every team, as they literally worked hard for three days on the production of the film," said Peter Pónya, the representative of the main character. Fortunately, the Slovak team of KEKS Production managed to submit the film before the deadline, so we had the opportunity to see it with our own eyes during a public screening on Saturday, October 28, 2017, at the Royal Cinema in Prague. And despite the fact that its creators did not win any prize this time, we can also confirm, based on the response of the audience, that their film called 1499, dealing with the very current topic of the influx of immigrants to Europe, was definitely one of the best that was created at this year's festival. The main prize went to the Czech One Shot team of Jakub Janatka with the film Bread and Butter. Among the Slovak teams, the only award for the child actress in the film Honey went to the NK Production team directed by Sam Spišák, who with another film in 2016 placed 2nd in the global competition in Atlanta, USA. The winner of the Prague festival advances to the global round, which will take place next year in Paris, and can compete for the main prize as well as participation in the Cannes International Film Festival.
Text and photo: Vladimír Dubeň