White on White

White on White

維拉.恰卡紐娃Viera ČÁKANYOVÁ
2020
  • Czech Republic
  • Slovakia
75min
Colour
  • DCP
G

White on White

Synopsis

Čákanyová shot this video diary during her stay at a Polish Antarctic station in 2017, where she filmed FREM, featuring an artificial neural network as its main character. In the diary, she converses with an artificial intelligence, exploring film, art, and the meaning of life, revealing a way of thinking free from humanity and emotionality.

'I got to the Antarctic while shooting my debut feature FREM. Out of an intense inner need, I kept an audiovisual diary mapping my experience of this special place. It was a form of mental hygiene, a part of my daily schedule as well as of my cinematographic obsession. The handheld, POV camera mediates my personal physical experience—I am a wanderer in a vanishing natural ecosystem marked by advancing climate change. I document the inexhaustible and suggestive morphologies of matter—glaciers, sea, animals, and weather. Every day, I watch the melting glaciers, fascinated by their unrepeatable structures in the changing light conditions. Providing an absurd opposite to the pure natural landscape, visual fragments of past locations, civilization scenes primarily from location scouting in China, appear in my subconscious mind in the insomnia of polar days, giving me anxiety for the future.' - Viera ČÁKANYOVÁ

Festivals & Awards
2021 Sheffield Doc/Fest
2021 RIDM
Director's Profile
Viera ČÁKANYOVÁ

Viera Čákanyová (b. 1980) studied scriptwriting at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and documentary filmmaking at FAMU in Prague. Her feature debut FREM (2019) premiered at the Ji.hlava IDFF 2019 and the Berlinale 2020, and won Best Debut at the ELBE DOCK Festival. Her subsequent film White on White (2020) claimed top honors at the Ji.hlava IDFF in 2020, GreenDox Award at Dokufest in Kosovo, the Czech Competition at One World in Prague, and was selected for the main competitions at Sheffield DocFest and ZagrebDox.

Filmography
2005 Elizexmachina
2005 00:00:00
2005 Talking heads
2006 Under Underground
2007 Piranha
2007 Worms
2009 100 Days
2009 Alda
2010 Olda
2011 Update
2014 Slovakia 2.0: Rupicapra
2014 Gottland: The Flying Horse
2019 FREM
2020 White on White
2023 Notes from Eremocene
Credit
Producer/Scriptwriter/Cinematographer/Sound|Viera ČÁKANYOVÁ
Camera (drone)|Tomáš KLEIN
Camera (China)|Dominik JURSA
Editor|Viera ČÁKANYOVÁ, Marek ŠULÍK
Print Source
Guča films|office@gucafilms.com