A Low-level Flight

Amateur home film is the source of the films created in the cycle Private Century. The material, which at the time it was made was important to a certain group of people, today presents historical testimony that is exclusive (unofficial) for its details and tone it. After decades as celluloid memories, a family portrait takes on the form of a universally communicable story. A Low-Level Flight tells the story of Tána and Václav from the end of the 1950s to the start of the normalization period. Václav was a fighter pilot in the Czechoslovak army. His wife played the role of an officer's wife, and after a time she and the family followed him to the Soviet Union. Infidelity and alcoholism gradually result in the marriage's break-up. In addition to describing the living conditions in a Soviet military housing estate, the film also presents the extraordinary footage that Václav filmed during test flights, which at the time he could probably have been imprisoned for filming. Sikl's visual archaeology is a unique meditation on the human condition. The director examines the existence of man as spread out across time and space through amateur home film footage. For the director these represent an important counterpart to the images of the past preserved in professional film productions. In a monologue Sikl emphasizes the fatefulness of the actions of the individual figures in the film. For the director the interpretation of history is the surface against which he arranges the film shadows of his film heroes.