Jan Švankmajer’s Surviving Life

Josef Janda, after having actively dedicated himself to rock music, today is an essayist, a historian of art and literature and a poet. Of his poetry, a critic has written that it is not necessary to attempt to completely understand it, for according to Janda: “Ultimately, why do people need to understand each other? What unites them is much more this impossibility of a consensus, as they say today”…. Like Švankmajer, Janda is a longstanding member of the Czech Surrealist Group. Founded in 1934, this group has had a great artistic influence in the Czech Republic despite having very long been prohibited by the state.
Visiting Brussels for the opening of the exhibition "Other Air" of the Czech Surrealist Group (at the Prague House), the two accomplices will pay a visit to Nova to read us some of their poetry. Their texts will be translated into English. The session will be introduced by Bruno Solarik, a surrealist artist himself.

Single ticket for the evening of 10/04 in the presence of Jan Švankmajer (reading, film and meeting): 7.5 € / 6 €.
Presale on April 5th, 6th and 7th at Nova in the evening.
50 seats remain available the same evening (box office opens at 6 p.m.)

In collaboration with the Czech Centre and the Prague House.

In this ’psychoanalytical comedy’ with an ironic title, we follow Eugene, a bureaucrat constantly navigating between warm and colourful dreams in which a young woman shows her attraction and tenderness to him, and the dull reality of everyday life set in a grey city. A psychoanalyst tries to interpret his oddest dreams by revisiting his childhood. But what really matters to our dyed-in-the-wool dreamer is less to understand his unchained imagination or even put an end to it than to delight in it at any moment. So when his wife asks him to choose between dreams and reality, Eugene does not hesitate one moment...

For his sixth feature film (the first without the collaboration of his wife who died in 2005), Švankmajer brings collage and papercutting techniques back into fashion, which he alternates with live action to create a world that is at once dreamlike, funny and disturbing.
Evoking turn in turn, sex, violence, fantasies, urges or non sequiturs, he oscillates between provocation and melancholy, openly inspired by his favourite authors Edgar Allan Poe and Lewis Carroll and in passing mocks Freud and Jung’s pretention of explaining the world through dreams. The result is a strange ballet where we encounter chicken-women, deer-men, snakes, beef tongues and tie-wearing dogs. As beautiful as a waking dream.

“Our society no longer trusts dreams if they cannot be capitalised, but only the reconciliation between dream and reality can give human life its fullness."
— Jan Švankmajer

Single ticket for the evening of 10/04 in the presence of Jan Švankmajer (reading, film and meeting): 7.5 € / 6 €.
Presale on April 5th, 6th and 7th at Nova in the evening.
50 seats remain available the same evening (box office opens at 6 p.m.)

"Surviving Life" is projected with English and French subtitles.