Helena Třeštíková

‘Why has my shitty life turned out like this? No-one knows. Not even God. God’s on holiday and he’s reading porn’ – an excerpt from Diary of the Forgotten, the journal kept by the main protagonist in the film. With raw authenticity, the director records the luckless fate of René over a period of twenty years as he yo-yos between prison and freedom. The life of René, who successfully stylises himself in the role of a desperado, unfolds against a backdrop of important political events occurring in the Czech Republic and beyond its borders. The Velvet Revolution, the presidential election, 9/11 and the Czech Republic’s accession to the EU – all this is ‘digested’ by René mostly from the confines of various prisons. The film also traces the director’s intriguing relationship with her ’subject of study’, who sometimes feels like a prostitute selling his life story for filthy lucre, but for whom the visits from the film crew or his countless letters to Helena Třeštíková are often his only solace.

Helena Trestikova graduated from the Department of Documentary Film at FAMU, Prague. Since l974 she has worked as a professional documentary filmmaker, and has made around fifty documentary films of various lengths and formats. Since winter 2002 she became a professor at FAMU, Documentary department.