After five long years of preparations, legendary Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer is almost ready to start filming his final feature film titled "INSECTS", a misanthropic and surreal imagery echoing Kafka and the Čapek Brothers. Jan Švankmajer (81) and his long-time producing partner Jaromír Kallista (77) are teaming up to make their last feature-length film.
A local pub in a small town. It’s Monday and the bar is closed, chairs are turned up on the tables. The pub is empty except for six amateur actors sitting in a corner. They've met to rehearse “The Insect Play” by the Čapek brothers. On a raised platform across the room we see a stage, set for Act II of the play. As the rehearsal progresses, the characters of the play are born and die with no regard to time. The actors slowly become one with them and some of them experience frightening transformations...
“The Čapek brothers' play is very misanthropic. I've always liked that — bugs behave as a human beings, and people behave as insects. My screenplay extends this misanthropy further while also reflecting Franz Kafka and his famous Metamorphosis." (Jan Švankmajer)
Jan Švankmajer is eager to start filming as soon as possible. He’s very busy visiting entomological auctions, buying various kinds of bugs, doing rehearsal shots with them and so on. But both Jan Švankmajer and Jaromír Kallista have a condition – that the film needs to be fully funded before they start shooting. They would like to make it with a certain grace, not having to hastily secure funding in the process.
And to do that, they need your help! HERE is the LINK to INDIEGOGO campaign.
“The civilization we live in has little interest in authentic artistic creation. What it needs is well-working advertisement, the iconographic contemporary art, pushing people towards more and more mass consumption. It gets increasingly difficult to fund independent art that scrutinizes the very core of our society. Who would deliberately support their own critics? We make a film every five or six years not because of a lack of ideas, but due to the lack of funds to back up our projects. Crowdfunding may be the way to change this. To those of you who choose to support our effort, I want to thank you. I promise you that I will invest my entire body and soul into this last feature film of mine. After all, that’s the only way I know how to create.” (JŠ)
Jan Svankmajer is an internationally acclaimed pioneer of stop-motion animation, a director, author and artist who has had a lasting impact on the works of Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, David Lynch, Brothers Quay and many others.
“We've known Jan for some 33 years now and he's one of the most pre-eminent, challenging and fearless animators in the history of cinema.” – Brothers Quay, Insects endorsement video
A prominent figure of the surrealist movement, Švankmajer is capable of creating dark yet playful worlds that dissect the very core of our society. He's responsible for more than 30 short and feature-length films that have won many prestigious awards along the way.