Lightdox Boards ‘Kapr Code,’ ‘Garconnieres,’ Ahead of Visions Du Reel Premieres (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Lise Pedersen Swiss sales agent Lightdox has added competition titles “Kapr Code” by Lucie Králová and “Garçonnières” by Céline Pernet to its lineup at international doc festival Visions du Réel, which runs April 7-17 in Nyon, Switzerland.Competing in the Burning Lights category, “Kapr Code” is described as a “documentary opera” that traces the life of controversial avant-garde Czech composer Jan Kapr (1914-1988), a Stalin Award laureate who was later banned in communist Czechoslovakia and erased from public memory.

Director Lucie Králová transfers the composer’s life into musical composition, playfully mixing modern opera songs with Kapr’s never-before-seen private archive, revealing his humor, inner struggles and desire to be remembered. “We faced the question of how to translate Kapr’s story into film while keeping its complexity, ambivalence and strength, and still reflect the unknown ‘holes’ or ‘blind spots’ in memory,” said Králová. “We reconstructed Kapr’s story from the fragments of memory we found.

Kapr actually re-created his story with us, as he is the author of 8mm footage, letters, music, but also his own life-story, which we follow in the opera songs.

In this way, Kapr composes his life thus co-creating this documentary,” she said. In “Garçonnières,” which features in VdR’s National Competition, director and anthropologist Céline Pernet explores her relationship with the men of her generation.