Toyen

A most undefinable and hallucinatory work by Němec, in which he dives into the visionary world of the Czech painter and leading light of both Czech and French surrealism Marie Čermínová (1902-1980). An avant-garde personality, she also challenged the traditional gender roles, taking the enigmatic gender-free name Toyen and becoming one of the few female faces of the surrealist movement. Following her aesthetic principles, Němec radically breaks with the conventions of biopic and with the retro genre as well. Fully aware that any artist biopic would always be a poor illustration of a character's life, as any true artist is unapproachable, he instead makes a kaleidoscope of different images, related and unrelated to reality at once. Archival fragments, re-enactments, Čermínová's paintings and her poetic works, as well as other materials and textures converge and diffuse in this ghostly film which, in the words of Toyen, could have been called "Splinters of Dreams" or even "Silence and Darkness". (International Film Festival Rotterdam)