The programme is timed and designed so that it might be seen in its entirety by the festival audience

Under the Linden 2008 Programme in detail
Wednesday 20 August – Sunday 24 August, 2008

We believe important works in whatever medium must be constantly re-imagined, their ideas and ideals shared in an appropriate context, in order to keep them and the awakened audience for them alive. This is work that is always growing, changing its shape and the way it is received, but it is work that keeps its root firmly in the earth, solid and unwavering. Like a tree it offers shelter, blossom, fruit and inspiration to all those fortunate enough to encounter it. Under the Linden is also about those fellow travellers who gather under its branches. It is about building a community of shared intent, about defending and promoting what matters.

All films are subtitled into English.

Wednesday 20 August


6pm Party and the Guests (Jan Nemec, Czechoslovakia, 1966) 71 mins.
Introduced by Mehelli Modi, www.secondrundvd.com
Distinguished by being 'banned forever' in its native Czechoslovakia, N_mec's film is a masterpiece of barbed, darkly sinister wit. As a biting satire of authoritarianism and conformity and with its astute observations of human nature, the film's universal relevance continues to this day. It was considered the most politically dangerous film made during the short flowering of Czech cinema in the 1960s.

“An acute piece of historical fore-sight, and a marvellous idea” - Time Out London

“an extraordinary allegory, evocative of Kafka or Dostoevsky”- International Film Guide

7.15pm Opening Reception
View of Photography Exhibition by Tereza Stehlíková in the zamek (castle)
Concert by Jirí Wehle 
Artist and Under the Linden co-director Tereza Stehlíková will exhibit photographs inspired by, and drawn from, the landscapes of Southern Bohemia and the foundational vision of Under the Linden, including her images from the book Rail Tracks by John Berger and Anne Michaels, to be launched here and published by Go Together Press. Please find more information on the page about the organisers.

Solo troubadour Jirí Wehle will perform in the castle. Please find more information on the guests page.

8.30pm Dinner

Thursday 21 August

10.30am Reading marking the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, 40 years to the day after it began. + Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (Alain Tanner, Switzerland, 1976) 116 mins. Presented by John Berger

One of the most important films of its decade and now being rediscovered in a new age of political engagement, Jonah… is perhaps the most humane radical feature yet made. Following the lives of eight characters all affected by the events and spirit of May 1968, it’s an honest, often humorous and movingly committed exploration of diverse attempts to reconcile life and ideals.

“Through circumstance, coincidence and necessity, eight characters find themselves drawn together. In various ways they're all irrevocably marked by the spirit of May '68, individually representative of the diverse political utopianism operating in the annus mirabilis of which Mailer wrote, 'One had the thought that the gods were back in human affairs'. Tanner gives us a Trotskyist journalist, an anarchic shopgirl who steals food, a transcendental mysticist, an educationalist; and labourer Mathieu Vernier (Rufus), who accommodates his friends' philosophies but realises that their enduringly optimistic visions can only be achieved through class struggle. Mathilde (Boyer), his wife, is pregnant with the Jonah of the title. Tanner again collaborated with John Berger, and the script is didactic and compact. It's a heady experience following their agile ruminations on time, language and perception, deftly superimposed on a film that pleases visually and formally.” - from Time Out London

1pm Lunch


2.15pm Yes (Sally Potter, Britain, 2005) 100 mins. + work in progress presentation by Sally Potter of extracts from her forthcoming feature Rage.
“The recipe for Potter’s latest film is characteristically intriguing and original. ‘Yes’ explores the racial, religious, cultural and sexual prejudice and conflict engendered in the somewhat unlikely love affair between the elegant Irish-American wife (Joan Allen) of a British politician (Sam Neill) and a charming but feisty Lebanese restaurant worker (Simon Abkarian), with all of the dialogue in rhyming couplets. It may sound pretentious and unappealing, but don’t let the prospect of verse put you off. The script is witty and made easy to follow by the performances, and the film is arguably her finest to date.

“A delightfully funny, touching and tenderly erotic romance for a post-9/11 world, it begins brilliantly with a quizzical, offbeat prologue in which Shirley Henderson’s confiding cleaning lady inspects her rich employers’ house for signs of muck while waxing philosophical and scientific over the evidence she finds not only of physical passion but of cosmic laws. Thereafter, the film charts the lovers’ courtship, consummation and almost inevitable slide into crisis as their various differences, inequalities and needs – not to mention the pressures exerted by the surrounding world – conspire to create a gulf between them…

“There’s a great deal to enjoy here. The performances are beautifully gauged, with Allen proving yet again that she’s one of the best screen actresses around. An inspired touch is her visit to a dying communist aunt (Sheila Hancock) in Belfast, which together with a wry but strangely uplifting epilogue contributes metaphysical meat to the piece. More sensual qualities, meanwhile, are provided by Potter’s typically acute sensitivity to music, dance, colour and movement. A real treat.” - Geoff Andrew, from Time Out London

5.45pm Hair - a staged presentation of the iconic musical (once directed for the screen by Czech film-maker Milos Forman) by Fajn Rock Music Production.
This authorised touring concert / stage version of the classic musical Hair was created after the closing of the initial Czech stage production, performed from 1996 to 1998 in the Pyramida Theatre in Prague. From some of the involved actors and singers the new ensemble has been created, which now tours the Czech Republic, Moravia and Slovakia, bringing its own unique interpretation of the musical to wider audiences. Thank you to the Mayor of Kamenice nad Lipou for booking this event.

7.30pm Dinner
- includes the first sitting of a traditional Czech feast in the hotel stables, enjoyed once by all guests over three days

9pm Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Jaromil Jires, Czechoslovakia, 1970) 77 mins.
“Shot in the lyrical Elvira Madigan mode, this celebrates the 'first stirrings of adolescence' of a beautiful young girl in a vaguely-defined Transylvanian townscape sometime in the last century. A student of folklore and mythology could perhaps detect a logical thread in the continuous sequence of vampires, devils, black magic, ritual and dance that the film presents, but for most people it will be a simpler and undemanding pleasure to sit back and be agreeably surprised as the images unfold. There is no clearly-defined story; the film's logic is that of the subconscious, its images those of the Gothic fairytale and the psychiatrist's couch, and its overall effect is stunning.” - from Time Out London

Friday 22nd August

11am The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, France, 2000) 82 mins. Presented by Sukhdev Sandhu.
“The French title of this delightful, encouraging documentary underlines how Agnès Varda identifies with her subjects - social marginals who 'glean' a living, from the earth (caravan dwellers) or from refuse (the teacher of Malian and Senegalese immigrants whom she befriends at a Paris street market). The veteran film-maker is newly inspired and energised by the freedom her DV camera brings. The film is marked by youthful freshness, and the integrity and sympathy of both the images and the commentary, as Varda hurtles us to Arras, Beaune or Paris in search of the new generation of foragers.

“Cheekily, she places a frocked lawyer in a crop field, so he can declaim on section 12.26.10 of the penal code enshrining the historic right to take harvest leftovers; persuades an art gallery to disinter a painting of glaneurs from its vaults; takes tips from a young Michelin chef who gleans herbs for his restaurant; or marvels at the totem towers of a nonagenarian Russian 'poubelle' artist. It's as if, in following the line of her inspiration, Varda has re-mapped France, her demography of 'marginalia' uniting a diverse community of individuals who're unearthed and celebrated with an intimacy and discretion that is essentially political.” - Wally Hammond, from Time Out London

1pm Lunch


2.15pm Toutes les Nuits (Eugène Green, France, 2001) 112 mins. Presented by Eugène Green
“What I find most resonant and precious about nineteenth century French novelist Gustave Flaubert's literature is the preciseness of his aesthetic in juxtaposing realism with romanticism, retaining a certain adherence to the classical form even as it is applied to the exposition of more progressive ideals of social commentary. It is through this framework that, in hindsight, Eugène Green seems ideally suited to interpret Flaubert's La Première éducation sentimentale (the first version of L'Éducation sentimentale), re-adapting the themes of first love, the intoxication of desire, and failed ideological revolution (that culminated in the Revolution of 1848) to the May ’68 generation through a chronicle of the parallel lives of a pair of childhood friends, the pragmatic Henri (Alexis Loret) and idealistic Jules (Adrien Michaux) as they leave their bucolic, rural hometown to separately pursue their baccalaureate - and real world - educations.

“Combining the baroque formalism and frontality often associated with Manoel de Oliveira's cinema (which the filmmaker subsequently subverts by breaking the fourth wall address, often through voiceover reading of letters) with the muted expression and disembodied framing of Robert Bresson (most notably, in recurring establishing shots of the character's feet) more commonly associated with modernist cinema, Green's cinema is also an idiosyncratic fusion of classicism with the immediacy of social critique, creating a sublime aesthetic that is equally atemporal and contemporary, archaic and modern.

“Along with illustrating Green's affinity with the aesthetics of Bresson, it also interesting to note that a similar sense of abstract metaphysicality pervades the film, a dislocated spirituality that is revealed through Jules' explicative insistence on the necessity for an overarching, universal order in the creation - and appreciation - of art and beauty during a class recitation of Paul Verlaine's poetry, and subsequently, in his extended sojourn at a Greek monastery after completing his undergraduate studies, where he writes to Henri that he can hear his own voice "and perhaps something else".

“In the characters' solitary quests to reconcile the corporeal with the spiritual - to define and give form to the inarticulable - Toutes les nuits thematically converges to a seemingly mundane tutorial instruction that "the most important things we do, we do alone", a sentiment that Jules repeats during a conversation with a child near the end of the film - a poignant and enduring realization of the isolation of unrequited love, the ache of longing, and the impossibility of happiness. - from Strictly Film School, www.filmref.com

5.30pm Reading of Poems about Prague, by Eugène Green, castle garden.
Green is a major poet in French, reinventing historic forms for a series of mediations on life, love, place, moments and the mystery of things. Here he will read charged personal poems about Prague over the last 40 years, in French.

6pm Czech Chamber Music Concert with The Martinu Quartet, castle yard.
Please see more information about the Quartet on the participants page. Thank you to the Mayor of Kamenice nad Lipou for booking this event.

7pm Dinner
- the second sitting of a traditional Czech feast in the hotel stables, enjoyed once by all guests over three days

8.30pm The Man Watching (Tereza Stehlíková, Britain / Czech Republic, 2008) 12 mins. + Black Sun (Gary, Tarn, Britain, 2006) 75 mins.
The Man Watching takes Rilke’s poem of the same name – his grandfather once owned the Zamek in Kamenice – as the unspoken voice of a journey by train through the snowbound landscapes of Southern Bohemia and on into the essential realms of the spirit and its struggle.


Gary Tarn's remarkable film, winner of many international awards and co-produced by Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también, Children of Men) and John Battsek (One Day in September), tells the story of Hugues de Montalembert, a French artist and filmmaker living in New York, who was blinded during a violent assault in 1978.

With this portrait of an unique man and his extraordinary reaction to a life-changing trauma, Tarn has created an expressionist film whose power lies in visualising a world from the perspective of the blind de Montalembert. Part- survivor's testimony, part- philosophical meditation on the nature of perception, Black Sun is a celebration of life that makes us see the world anew.

“… In a feature-length voiceover, the artist reveals the inevitable despair that initially ensued, but then moves into an emotionally and philosophically charged celebration of being alive in the phenomenal world. A remarkable statement of personal resistance, it is accompanied by a river of images, of cities and landscapes – the locations visited by de Montalembert – that deploy a lyrical but grounded visual language similar to that of work by Jonas Mekas, Peter Mettler and, most relevantly, Chris Marker, with Sans Soleil. But this project is no pastiche of influences. Entirely Tarn’s film, Black Sun never seeks easy illustration of its subject’s journey, physical or otherwise; rather, it catches the luminous materiality of the seen as a means to the most searching spiritual enquiry. A work for all places and times, for anyone who seeks fully to live, to engage, it is indeed essential viewing.” - from Time Out London

Saturday 23rd August


10.30am Markéta Lazarová (Franticek Vlácil, Czechoslovakia, 1967) 162 mins.
Voted the best Czech film ever made, Marketa Lazarová is a powerful and passionate medieval epic set in the mid-13th Century. Based on avant-garde writer Vladislav Vancura's novel, it follows the rivalry between two warring clans, the Kozlíks and the Lazars, and the doomed love affair of Mikolás Kozlík and Marketa. Re-creating an authentic world and as reminiscent of Tarkovsky and Kurosawa as it is of the rich tapestry of Czech fiction, this ambitious and multi-layered film is the crowning achievement of Vlácil's career and one of the undiscovered cornerstones of world cinema.

“An epic medieval meditation. Acting out the intrigue, suspicion and bloodlust of 13th century tribal rivalry, the plot, such as it is, is wilfully wayward and often close to impenetrable. As 'pure cinema', though, it's stark, daring and often astoundingly dynamic. Black and white 'Scope camerawork surveys a cruel, desolate landscape of plains, castles and forests populated by scavenging strays, strugglers, tyrants and wolf-men, while an eerily evocative sound design gives the picture a near hallucinatory quality. It's not so much a drama as an ancient litany - mystical and feral rather than spiritual or religious.” - from Time Out London
1.15pm Lunch

2.30pm Play Me Something (Timothy Neat, Britain, 1989) 72 mins. Presented by John Berger
This very little seen but widely admired meditation on love, politics, culture and the whole damn thing also sees Berger in compelling performance mode as a storyteller. Shot in multiple formats to convey the textures of time and memory, it’s a poignant and resolutely independent British film.

“Berger here collaborates with Neat to bring one of his own short stories to the screen, also appearing as the mysterious story teller. A handful of men and women await the plane for Glasgow on the Hebridean island of Barra: visitors, a girl (Swinton) setting off for a job on the mainland, locals who have charge of the airport, and in their midst, the writer himself. Jaunty, vibrant and expansive, he makes a mesmerising storyteller; and his tale, on the face of it a simple yarn of a peasant (Brumo) on a weekend trip to Venice, becomes a complex exploration of people and places, factories and farms, sex, politics, music... ways of being. The film quite naturally takes on myriad textures: colour and black-and-white, 35mm and blown-up 16mm footage and, for the story-within-the-story, still photographs by the exemplary Jean Mohr. Berger and Neat have discovered that there is a useful application for post-modernism after all, the better to tell a tale.” - from Time Out London

Play Me Something will be released for the first time on dvd by Second Run and will be launched at Under the Linden.

4pm John Berger and Anne Michaels: readings and conversation
Berger and Michaels will read respectively from their forthcoming novels, From A to X and The Winter Vault, as well as from their newly published collaboration Rail Tracks, published by Go Together Press and launched today.

5.15pm Orlando (Sally Potter, Britain, 1992) 90 mins. Presented by Sally Potter
“There are lots of intellectual traditions vying for ascendancy in Potter's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's 1928 modernist novel, but the joy is that the film comes over simply: a beautiful historical pageant of 400 years of English history, full of visual and aural pleasures, sly jokes, thought-provoking insights, emotional truths - and romance. It begins at the opulent court of Virgin Queen Elizabeth (Crisp), where the male immortal Orlando receives favour and an estate; and thence follows his quest for love in 50-year jumps through the Civil War, the early colonial period, the effete literary salons of 1750 (by which time Orlando is a woman), the Victorian era of property, and finally a 20th century postscript added by Potter.

“The fine, stylised performances from an idiosyncratic international cast are admirably headed by Swinton's magnificent Orlando, who acts as the film's complicitous eyes and ears; and there's little to fault in the cinematography, which renders the scenes with rare sensitivity. It's a critical work - in the sense that it comments wryly on such things as representations of English history, sexuality / androgyny and class - but made in the spirit of a love poem to both Woolf and the England that made us.” - from Time Out London

5.30pm Live Jazz with the JH Dixi Band, town square
Dixieland Jazz  for a relaxing summer’s evening, care of local musicians, the JH Dixi Band. Thank you to the Mayor of Kamenice nad Lipou for booking this event.
7pm dinner
- the third sitting of a traditional Czech feast in the hotel stables, enjoyed once by all guests over three days
 

8.45pm Le Monde Vivant (Eugène Green, France, 2003) 75 mins. Presented by Eugène Green
“Leave it to an expatriate American director to outdo the French at their own game. Eugène Green makes films that seem a throwback to the heady days of the nouvelle vague: gorgeously shot, full of talk and ideas, and peopled with handsome young actors. Closer in spirit to the refinements of Rohmer than to the anarchic energies of Godard, a Green film is stately and mannered; he looks to the stylization of baroque theater for inspiration.

“Le Monde Vivant is a medieval fairy tale—complete with knights, damsels and an ogre—presented in modern dress and peppered with contemporary slang. The aesthetic is low-tech: a lion is played by a Labrador retriever, not conjured by Narnia-style CGI.”  - from Time Out New York

Sunday 24 August


11am Le Pont des Arts (Eugène Green, France, 2004) 126 mins. Presented by Eugène Green
"Le Pont des Arts is the dual story of a young opera singer, Sarah (Natacha Régnier), and a grad student in literature, Pascal (Adrien Michaux), both vaguely unhappy in life and love, whose only contact comes when he hears a recording of her ethereal voice. Haunted by the music of Monteverdi and swirling with questions about art, happiness and identity, Le Pont des Arts is most stunning when the camera pauses to study an actor's face in direct close-up; such shots have all the expressive beauty and psychological insight of Renaissance portraits.” From Time Out New York

“An audacious, mythically slanted inquiry into the place of high art in today's chaotic culture and an assertion of its primacy. The movie's focal image is the bridge over the Seine (a metaphorical bridge between life and death) from which one emotionally devastated woman makes a suicidal leap, and on which she reappears as a wise, passionate spirit. Its major characters include two mismatched young couples and a nest of catty music and theatre mavens. The movie scrutinizes the relationships between art and everyday life among these characters and finds variations that range from indifference to obsession.

“In its stately final third, Le Pont des Arts coalesces as a supernatural love story with references to Orpheus and Eurydice. Pascal's redemption begins when he plays a recording of Sarah singing Monteverdi's Lamento della ninja. The beauty of her voice transports him out of his despair and he falls in love. Identifying her from the liner notes, he embarks on a search for her. In a final, romantic leap of faith, the film imagines a connection between the living and the dead, a belief in the purity and wholeness of a love beyond the physical that can only be experienced in the fullness of great music.” - from the New York Times

1.15pm Lunch

2.30pm Fugitive Pieces (Jeremy Podeswa, Canada, 2007) 104 mins. Presented by Anne Michaels
“Nuanced, scrupulous and powerful, Fugitive Pieces begins in wartime Poland, from which nine-year-old Jakob (Robbie Kay), fleeing Nazis who have murdered his parents and kidnapped his sister, escapes with the help of a Greek archaeologist named Athos (Serbedzija). The remainder of this lyrical, nonlinear film, based on the award-winning novel by Anne Michaels, chronicles Jakob’s painful struggle over the ensuing decades to deal with this primal loss, first as a child on the island of Zakynthos and later as an adult (played by Dillane) in postwar Canada, where he and Athos eventually make their home.

“Among the casualties in this emotional battlefield is Jakob’s marriage to his first wife, Alex (Rosamund Pike), a caring woman whose raw vitality only deepens his isolation. At one point Alex calls Jakob’s obsession with the details of the Nazi extermination “obscene,” and it’s a concern that Fugitive Pieces takes quite seriously. While haunted by the after-effects of violence, the movie itself is nearly devoid of it—even the shooting of Jakob’s parents is represented only by an obstructed view of a head falling out of frame. Triggered by key sights and sounds, the pervasive flashbacks suggest the physical nature of memory, locating the source of Jakob’s pain inside his very senses, and rendering the film’s final, redemptive scenes all the more meaningful.” - from Time Out New York

5pm The Word for Snow - The international premiere presentation of a new play by Don DeLillo, directed by Jack McNamara, with Tony Guilfoyle and others.
Future Ruins is a new theatre company specialising in cross media productions. Their work falls under two main categories: using mixed media onstage and adapting works in other media for theatrical production. The company was set up at the end of 2006 by writer/director Jack McNamara following the success of his UK premiere production of Don DeLillo’s multimedia play Valparaiso. The production had earned London’s Old Red Lion Theatre its first ‘Peter Brook/Empty Space Award’. With a background in both film and theatre, Jack McNamara formed Future Ruins as a means of exploring the limits of theatrical presentation and re-inventing a new body of works for the stage. In addition to new writing, the company discovers and adapts obscure works of literature, film and music, giving them new life in a new form (the most recent being Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blind for London’s Arcola Theatre).

Tony Guilfoyle has worked extensively in theatre internationally, establishing a strong presence in a number of key productions by Canadian visionary Robert Lepage. He also appears regularly on British television.

The Word for Snow was commissioned by Steppenwolf Theater for the Chicago Humanities Festival (centring on a theme of climate change, tagged 'The Climate of Concern'), and premiered on October 27, 2007.

“Steppenwolf commissioned Don DeLillo, three of whose works we have produced… Our partner, Teatra Luna, commissioned their ensemble member and co-founder, playwright and actor Tanya Saracho. We loved the idea of commissioning two playwrights of such disparate perspectives and aesthetics to write on a single topic.

“One of the things that I have found most intriguing about the commissioning of these two works by playwrights so different in their sensibilities, is that both seemed to have focused on language. Both playwrights have seized upon the fact that what we know (and what we refuse to know) is deeply reflected in the language we produce (and avoid) to describe our experience. This concentration on language is very reminiscent for me of 1984. Orwell’s great message in 1984 was that a totalitarianism of thought begins with the ownership of language – what we call stuff is essential to our freedom, to our social agency - and artists are a key component in the production of that language.” - Martha Lavey, from the Steppenwolf Theatre website
6pm Under a new Linden: planting towards a future.
The planting of Linden trees in the town is intended both to anchor the event’s relation to the town and to mark the beginning of a longer journey.

7pm Dinner

8.45 Closing Conversations, with all our guests and a surprise final screening of a short work that stands almost alone in its medium and in world cinema as an expression of both great vision, remarkable accomplishment and common, miraculous humanity.

ENDS 25 August am with return to Prague and onward journeys.