H*ART ON dives off the deep end of modern art. A film about the yearning to create, to mould everyday emotions into a meaningful life and, most of all, to live beyond one's death. A struggle that gets to the existential core of each of us. How do you find meaning in everyday fear, love, sex and loneliness?
Virtually without exception, a relation between parents and children is something that affects us throughout our lives. The first fiction film by award-winning documentarist Jaro Vojtek is an omnibus film about complicated relationships between parents and their children in which characters are challenged with long-term separation or declining health. Four stories titled Son, Marathon, Canary and Father tell four different tales that form a single view on the troubled relationship between parents and children. Each story takes place in a different season and together they create a multi-layered mosaic of relations reflecting hopes, disappointments and inevitable decisions. With a documentary filmmaker’s precision, Vojtek observes the characters and their behaviour, presenting an authentic picture of damaged family relations.
In the second half of the 18th century, Jeremy Bentham designed the model of a panopticon, a type of building that made supervision most effective. Panopticons were firstly used for prisons, places where supervision and punishment are the main functions. Secret services but also different surveillance technologies are the new panopticons. They can monitor, save and store data about people to identify them, to distinguish the location and time of people’s behaviour and actions. Architecture theorist, software expert, people who are or were monitored, or the former secret service agents explain their panoptical experience. Reading again Michel Foucault´s Discipline and Punish, through experience with different kinds of supervision, in the film we are looking for the perfect application of the panoptical principle.
