Tomáš Kratochvíl

Czech director

Tomáš Kratochvíl grew up in a small village in the Vysočina region. He graduated from the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University and spent a year in the Film Editing Department at FAMU. He gained attention as a documentary filmmaker with the film Gadžo (2014), an original film diary of his six-month stay among the Roma in the excluded community of Předlice. His feature-length film Czechs Against Czechs (2015) received a Special Jury Mention at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival. The documentary Azylové domy (2015) explores social and racial issues as well as legislative processes. The film Uprchlíci (2016) captures the situation on the Turkish border with the Islamic State and the smuggling business on the Turkish coast. In 2022, he completed a time-lapse feature-length documentary about a Czech Romani family in the United Kingdom titled Pongo Calling (2022), which had its world premiere at the Sheffield Film Festival and won numerous awards in Europe and the Czech Republic. His eight-part television series on experimental archaeology, Masters of Old Crafts (2022), premiered at the AFO festival in Olomouc. Tomáš Kratochvíl regularly contributes short films on environmental, social, and historical themes to several series on Czech Television. At the same time, he is preparing an extensive environmental film project in his native village. The theme is the transformation of the landscape with the help of the local community and experts, and the project is titled I Have Land, But I Know Shit.