Can You Still Feel The Butterflies ?

Main hero of Radek Brousil’s film in a half-dead fish costume wanders through a city and a country in a mental dialog speaking to a female hyperobject about the end, shame, guilt and possibility to do something. Skateboarding, smoking cigarettes and questions about “feeling the butterflies” together with long, distancing shots and captivating music as if would refer to melancholic romance of independent 90s cult movies. The authenticity of intimate experience is however constantly alienated by the overal theatricality of costumes and props, overplay, cut-ins and mainly ever present shadows of real catastrophe. Intentionally unresolved ambivalence of intimate and real-life drama can be hence read as resolutive appeal. Critical reading of Czech culture and history mingles with personal sentiment for the landscapes of our childhood.

The entire film dialogues are as a collage put together from 90s indie-emo bands lyrics.

Love, self-harm, suicide, pain and anxiety are in the script dialogues ambivalently thematised between individual story and common fate of the planet. In the only song of the film, Brousil himself sings “I’ll try, I’ll try, I’ll try” and underlines the tension between authentic feeling of the impossibility of authentic position, the anxiety and powerlessness.

Shot as a zero waste film.