Martin Šulík | WatchedThis
Martin Šulík
Directing
Biography
Martin Šulík is a Slovak film director. He studied film directing at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava from which he graduated in 1986. His 2011 film Gypsy was selected as the Slovak entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards, but it did not make the final shortlist.
Filmography Movies
Acting
Prague Stories
A four-story omnibus depicting different Czech slices-of-life from the titular city.
The Story of The Miraculous Virgin
Documentary about Stefan Uher's film.
The Truth Is All There Is
Eduard Grečner. Film director, dramaturge, publicist and poet. A talented fi lmmaker with precise artistic goals which, due to circumstances and the times, he was not always able to realise. Refl ections on the ideological and aesthetic starting points he consecutively followed during his creative career, [as well as] on the meaning and mission of art and the principles that art should never abandon. [It is] about reality limiting the freedom of artistic expression, confl icts with power and the consequences that Eduard Grečner – a human being and an artist – decided to face without ever compromising his own views and conscience, because the truth is all there is.
The Last Self-portrait
Slovak director Marek Kuboš has not shot a film in 13 years. His first film ever – a student exercise at film school – was a self-portrait. The circle is closed, the source of creativity has seemingly dried up. All that is left to do in the last self-portrait is to clean up after oneself, to recapitulate one’s successes and failures, and to bid farewell to one’s protagonists. This introspective meta-documentary is not so much a study of a creative crisis as it is a self-therapeutic process and an attempt at offering a comprehensive profile of the filmmaker at a time of unstable certainties. Appearing in the role of Kuboš’s consultants are essentially all leading Slovak documentary filmmakers.
Servants
Michal and Juraj, two students of a theological seminary in totalitarian Czechoslovakia, must decide if they'll choose the easier way of collaboration, or if they'll subject themselves to the surveillance of the secret police.
Buko
After losing her husband, Jarmila finds herself at a crossroads in her life, where she must decide whether to patiently "wait out" the rest of her life or rebel and throw herself into an adventure with an uncertain outcome. Despite the well-meaning advice of her adult children, she chooses the latter. This involves living in a cottage in the romantic wilderness of the Mácha region, which her husband particularly loved. In addition, he bequeathed her a retired circus horse named Buka in his will, which at first glance seems like a cruel joke, because Jarmila is afraid of horses. With the help of her neighbors, she decides to face the situation head-on and soon discovers that, although it didn't seem like it at first, it is precisely this horse that could bring happiness back into her life.
The Teacher
The principal of an elementary school calls a special parents meeting after it’s alleged that the seemingly empathetic and kindly-looking teacher Mrs. Drazděchová uses her students to manipulate their parents.
Zrelá mladosť
Biographical film about the work of the young Klement Gottwald. The story depicts his stay in Banská Bystrica, where he edited the Slovak communist press and helped organise the communist revolutionary movement.
Dedinský sen
An old woman dreams her last dream in the house where she has lived all her life, but now she has to leave it. Divided into five separate, internally coherent parts, the story recapitulates her life while remaining a universal final recapitulation of each individual's life. Its wit is primarily based on the charm of its specific verbal expression with original slang expressions.
Production
Visions of Europe
Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.
The Garden
Jakub's life arrived at a dead-end. He leaves his job, and gets into conflict with his father. The trouble just grows by his relation with a married woman. Breaking out, Jakub realizes the pleasures of the countryside in the old garden of his grandfather. He finds true love with an angel, and encounters various exciting moments of his new free life. Strange visitors arrive, and he wont get back to town anymore.
Gypsy
For 14-year-old Adam, the world of his poor Romany village has only two joys: boxing and Julka, a friend his same age. But after the violent death of his father, the boy experiences life’s harsher side: his mother remarries and his stepfather demands obedience without seeking to deserve Adam’s respect. Gradually everything the boy was attached to starts to fall apart around him, and if his dead father hadn’t visited him he wouldn’t even know which path to take. The inexperience of youth, loneliness, and impulsiveness prevent him from using reason and cool consideration to face the obstacles in his way, and he even sometimes provokes those who stand by him. And thus he finds himself in a situation for which there is only one solution.
Prague Stories
A four-story omnibus depicting different Czech slices-of-life from the titular city.
The City of the Sun
Four friends, Karel, Milan, Tomáš, and Vinco, lose their jobs in Ostrava’s working-class districts and, with their livelihoods gone, struggle to redefine themselves. They launch various business ventures but lack experience, leading to repeated failures. Pressure mounts on their friendships and private lives as tensions flare. Through setbacks and mutual support, they embark on a journey of self-discovery, learning resilience, solidarity, and the true meaning of identity and camaraderie in a changing world.
The Key for Determining Dwarfs or The Last Travel of Lemuel Gulliver
A Czech director wrestles with problems personal and political during the Prague spring of 1968.
Piece of land
Ten short unrelated stories that move chronologically through Slovakia's twentieth-century history as seen from the perspective of life in small towns and villages.
Everything I Like
A film about the uncertainties faced by a man in post-Communist Slovakia, his relationship with a teenage son and English teacher girlfriend who's soon to return home to England.
Orbis Pictus
In Slovakia, the sixteen year-old Terezka is discharged from her school with a letter to her mother. Along her surrealistic journey to find her mother, Terezka entwines reality and fantasy and meets a man that is hired to burn clothes; a woman buried on the ground; a young bride that is marrying the forty and something year-old widow of his brother to support her family as a tradition in their village; her younger brother that is intern in a special school; a decadent TV comedian and his wife; a powerful mobster in the kitchen of a restaurant; one lover of her mother in her former address; and finally her promiscuous mother that advises her to travel through the world.
Orbis Pictus
In Slovakia, the sixteen year-old Terezka is discharged from her school with a letter to her mother. Along her surrealistic journey to find her mother, Terezka entwines reality and fantasy and meets a man that is hired to burn clothes; a woman buried on the ground; a young bride that is marrying the forty and something year-old widow of his brother to support her family as a tradition in their village; her younger brother that is intern in a special school; a decadent TV comedian and his wife; a powerful mobster in the kitchen of a restaurant; one lover of her mother in her former address; and finally her promiscuous mother that advises her to travel through the world.
Gallery
