Jan Kapr is considered a central figure of musical modernism during the Cold War. The fate of the Czech composer is therefore closely linked to the history of socialism. While the progressive artist was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1951, his uncompromising work soon fell out of favor. The music was banned and from then on only played abroad.
Kapr Code is a biographical opera. Lucie Králová's approach to Jan Kapr's eventful, contradictory life follows a libretto based on the artist's personal, previously unpublished archive. Music and photos, tapes, letters, notes and amateur films, fragments of police reports, political writings and love letters are used to create a piece for 17 opera singers. In this completely documentary production, the creation is revealed as a political act. The director deliberately leaves the gaps in Kapr's biography open by strictly using only Kapr's estate. The original cinematic staging allows traces of who else Kapr might have been to be glimpsed. Ursula Pfander
DIRECTOR
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Lucie Králová
MgA. Lucie Kralova, Ph.D., is a recognized Czech film director, screenwriter and lecturer at FAMU Prague. Her documentaries, often shot on 16mm film, have been shown at many international film festivals and have won numerous awards, such as The Ill-Fated Child (2003) and Sold (2005), both of which were awarded Best Czech Documentary at the IDFF in Jihlava; the documentary Lost Holiday (2007), which was distributed internationally on 35mm film, received the Crystal Globe for Best Documentary at the Karlovy Vary IFF and other awards; Lucie Kralova also works as a dramaturge on major documentaries, such as Caught in the Net (2020) by Klusák/Chalupová (the most successful Czech documentary of all time) or Athanor: The Alchemical Furnace (2020), which was shown at which was shown at IFF Rotterdam 2020. She has recently completed her new documentary opera Kapr Code, which was awarded Best Project at the Avant Premièrere/Sunny Side of the Docs Pitch in Berlin 2020 during development and selected as WIP for Cinema du Réel Paris Doc Work in Progress 2021.
