Tomáš Kratochvíl

Czech director

Tomáš Kratochvíl was born in 1983 and grew up in a village in the Highlands. He graduated from the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University and spent a year at the Department of Editing at FAMU. He participated as a director in the feature film Hives (2012), a collaboration between five European film schools, which was screened, among others, at the San Sebastian Film Festival. Tomáš Kratochvíl made his mark as a documentary filmmaker with Gadžo (2014), an original film diary about a six-month stay among Roma in an excluded locality in Předlice. His feature film Czechs Against Czechs (2015), a loose sequel, received a special mention from the jury at the Jihlava International Film Festival and won the AKE DIKHEA? European Roma Film Festival in Berlin.

The documentary Shelters (2015) deals with social and racial issues as well as legislative processes. Refugees (2016) deals with the situation on Turkey’s border with the Islamic State and the smuggling business on the Turkish coast. The author posed as a refugee himself and used a hidden camera to capture the complex negotiations with smugglers and the journey across the sea in a rubber dinghy. The documentary Spolužáci (2017) explores the division of Czech society through the author’s dialogues with his former classmates from a rural primary school. In 2022, Tomáš Kratochvíl completed a time-lapse feature documentary about a family of Czech Roma in the UK. Entitled Pongo Calling (2022), it 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 Czech Television series. He is currently finishing a co-produced documentary about the Monoxylon expedition – a reconstruction of the voyage of the first farmers across the Aegean Sea in the Early Stone Age. He is also preparing a large-scale environmental film project in his home village. It is about transforming the landscape with the help of the local community and experts and is called I Have Land but I Know Shit.