Fair Play represents Czech cinema at the Oscars

22 September 2014

Film Industry

Fair Play represents Czech cinema at the Oscars

Film Industry

Fair Play represents Czech cinema at the Oscars

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The Czech Film and Television Academy decided by taking a vote about the Czech candidate for the nominations for the Oscar in the category of Best Foreign Language Film. Among the films of this year, the winner is the film Fair Play, directed by Andrea Sedláčková. It will represent Czech cinema at the 87th Oscars.

Fair Play tells a story of a young athlete Anna (Judit Bárdos), whose mother (Anna Geislerová) and coach (Roman Luknár) hope that she will meet the requirements and qualify to the Olympics. Without knowing it, she was being administered with anabolic steroids. Her sport performance is getting better but the first health problems come along. Anna learns the truth about the preparations and despite the fact that it can damage her chances to take part in the Olympics she decides to train without them. However, her mother hopes that Anna will emigrate durin the Olympics and she decides to administer the anabolic steroids to her daughter secretly, pretending that they are harmless vitamins. The film was produced by the company Negativ (Kateřina Černá and Pavel Strnad) and several days ago it was also long listed for the European Film Awards.

The director as well as the scriptwriter of the film Andrea Sedláčková studied screenwriting at Prague's FAMU, and in the autumn of 1989, she emigrated to Paris where she studied film directing and editing at the film school FEMIS. In 2000, she made her first feature film called Oběti a vrazi (Victims and Murderers), she was the director of the film and she also wrote the screenplay. In France, she worked as a film editor on many feature films, e.g. the drama Merry Christmas (Joyeux Noël) that was nominated for the Oscar in the category Best Foreign Language Film. At the moment, she is finishing a documentary The Life According to Václav Havel, produced by ARTE television and Czech Television.

"I feel a bit as if I‘ve just qualified for the Olympics! I am immensely happy for everybody who has worked on the film, especially for Judit Bárdos and Anna Geislerová, who made the film as it is. Our film tells the story of a sprinter but the preparation and shooting of the film was rather a marathon, a long distance run. Four years passed between the moment when I read a newspaper article about the state-controlled doping in Czechoslovak communist sport and the shooting itself. During those years I wrote nineteen versions of the screenplay and the producers from Negativ were taking care of the finances. Then the shooting of the film was a sport performance for everybody," says the director of the film Andrea Sedláčková.

The nominations for the Oscars will be announced on 15th January 2015 and the ceremony will take place on 22nd February 2015 in Los Angeles.

Czech Film Center
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