Nikdy nejsme sami

Somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the Czech provinces, a handful of people come together: a paranoid prison guard, his hypochondriac neighbour and the latter’s silent, despairing wife, a lovesick nightclub manager and a stripper who is a single mum. Here, peace, joy and hope are just slogans on a T-shirt. Although they live on a connecting road, life offers them nothing but dead ends. Yet brighter colours are soon mixed in to their black and white everyday existence. The encounters between the characters bear witness to rebellion and irrational hopes, as well as cruelty. The depiction of this milieu shifts between the realistic and the bizarre. The forest setting, the many tracking shots and streets, lend the action an almost metaphorical note. Where are we really, and where are we heading? In this film, the provinces are more than just a stronghold of quirky, yet sympathetic individuals; they are a frame of mind, a self-righteous need to set oneself apart from anything different. Your father is afraid of diseases, mine is afraid of people, says the prison guard’s son to the hypochondriac’s son.