One Life

One day in an ordinary life of an extraordinary woman. Although retired Lída Voříšková is always on the way. Her destinations are not far away – local graveyard, library, language school where she works as a cleaning lady, her cousins’ place outside Prague. People and places make up her world. Some are still alive, others, as her father who died in a communist prison, not. She was 5 years old, when she last saw him. Nevertheless, her dad and his absence go through her life as a red line. This is just one day, and Mrs. Voříšková is still on the way.

PRESS RELEASE:
Whys and Hows of “One Life”
The choice to shoot with Lída Voříšková was intuitive and with no hesitation. It was absolutely clear to me that she is just my type. She had already featured as a main character in one part of the series “The Children of Stalinism”, audiovisual testimonies for teaching contemporary Czech history at Czech elementary and high schools. As students of Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) we could choose our main characters from these materials. Although her story was not the most dramatic one, she won my heart by her views, sense of humor, and a flavor of mischief she employed even when talking about such serious issues as death and imprisonment of her dad. At the beginning I planned to build the story around the fact that she has never got married, which I wrongly attributed to her losing her father at such a young age. This was also the direction I tried to lead the document to. As I met her several times I slowly realized that if it had ever been issue in Lída’s life it certainly is not today. Lída Voříšková lives by present. She gets best out of life and she enjoys it. Together, we then decided on the concept of the documentary. It will be one day in her life. We will be visiting her friends and family and we will focus on her life here and now, because even those who are not here anymore, her dad and her mum, form part of her life.

Lída was willing to go along with us on everything we as a filming crew came up with. Without a word of complaint, she wiped off a perfectly cleaned table ten times, she was walking with us in the fields when the temperatures rose to up 40 degrees Celsius. What is more, during the brakes in between the shooting she was a great fun to be with. For Lída, it is not easy to talk about her life and I am glad she opened up for our documentary. She put her trust in us and this obliged me to great responsibility during the shooting and postproduction. I hope we did not disappoint her.

Last nice memory of my dad

„The last nice memory I have of my father is when they kicked him out of his job in Vyšehrad publishing house and he started working in a wood-processing company Krupol. Every day he returned home deadly tired, because it was manual job. He had wood chippings in his socks. He sat on a chair in the kitchen and my brother and me were putting out these wood chippings out from his socks. For us, it was kind of a game. For him hard work.“