Alda

Mrs. O. is suffering from dementia. Her story is told through a combination of documentary footage and her video journals. She uses a digital camera to document daily activities, memories, thoughts, and event commentaries. Through an individual story of gradual memory loss, Alda reflects the attitude of the post-communist society towards its recent history.

'I found Mrs. Oldriska by random search on the internet when I was searching for information about different malfunctions of memory. She had a blog, where she published short diary notes and simple poems. According to her profile, she suffered from Alzheimer's type of dementia. I found it interesting how she reflects on her past through the experience with the disease, what remains in the memory and what just fades and how different memories deform or reform the past, not just in some individual life, but also in so-called collective memory of a society, or country.

I wrote the script of the film Alda based on our discussions and her diaries, and I used her expressions, her way of talking and reflecting reality. It is her voice-over in the film. A lot of ideas emerged spontaneously or as a result of improvisation during the recording. The lady in the picture is an actress, because for Mrs. Oldriska the shooting would be extremely exhausting, and she was OK with this kind of solution.

While I was writing the script for Alda, I lent a small digital camera to Mrs. Oldriska and asked her to record for me some situations from her everyday life. I thought it might help me with the writing, and that maybe I could use some of it in the film. But when I saw the footage, it was a separate movie by Mrs. Oldriska herself. I ended up editing the material to 75 minutes and named the film Olda. With no previous experience in filmmaking, she uses the camera in a very spontaneous way, sometimes fighting with the technical limits of the device, sometimes even forgetting about the shooting itself. The result is a diary-style film dealing with aging, pain, and solitude in a raw, non-aestheticized manner.

These two films are in a way complementary and they refer to different ways of approaching reality in documentary filming—an author's point of view versus the pure record of what appears to be so-called "authentic reality.' - Viera ČÁKANYOVÁ