Marcela

What's it like to see life unfold before your eyes? 

When Helena Třeštíková made the series Marriage Stories in 1987, she convinced six couples about to get married to let her film them for six years. After this tour de force - having filmed her couples in "normalized" Czechoslovakia following the euphoria of the Prague Spring - she continued her exploration of human evolution and relationships by continuing to film with her protagonists. Marcela is one of these people, chosen at random by the director, whose life is recounted here, in time-lapse, over a period of almost 30 years.

There's something cruel about watching fate take its toll. It's unfair to witness class dynamics at play. There's something frightening about seeing a life brought together, overflown, in a few dozen minutes, in hundreds of shots.

And at the same time, what Helena Třeštíková is trying to achieve is to show, by completely changing the usual perspective, what human lives are like. And seeing them in this way, through the spyglass of extended time, reveals unusual things. Our individual destinies lie at the crossroads of tectonic plates that are often beyond us, and we delude ourselves about the scope of our choices and our agency, trying to convince ourselves that we are in full control of the free fall that is life. 

And yet, in spite of it all, every human life, once examined, is made up of the same miracle, the same absolute grandiosity, which constitutes us all, and which makes us shudder at the fate of our fellow human beings, no matter what generation, sex, class, nation or historical background they come from. This is the irreducible strength of humanity.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director