Private Project

If Pigeons Turned to Gold

A balancing act between love and contempt, care and destruction in film that seeks to discover if family saves our life or – on the contrary – destroys it.

If Pigeons Turned to Gold follows three years of lives of four family members, whose shared past has grown into a present fundamentally at odds. While Pepa, the film's author and narrator, studies at university and is sober, their brother and two cousins have been unhoused for over a decade, each facing their own substance dependency. The feature documentary film navigates its way through shared trauma, codependency and the core meaning of family. It's a story of a cycle-breaking, acceptance and healing power of nature. Story of how to let live (and die) in order to respect not only our loved ones and their journeys but life itself.

  • Pepa Josefina Lubojacki
    Director
  • Pepa Josefina Lubojacki
    Writer
  • Klára Mamojková
    Producer
  • Wanda Kaprálová
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Documentary
  • Genres:
    family portrait, psychological, addiction, debut
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 50 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    December 30, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    500,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Czechia
  • Country of Filming:
    Czechia
  • Language:
    Czech, English
  • Shooting Format:
    digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    Yes - FAMU – Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Pepa Josefina Lubojacki

Pepa Lubojacki – director (they/them) is a Prague-based scriptwriter and documentary film director. Their work focuses on topics such as gender binarity and stereotypes, family trauma, addiction, and co-dependency. Pepa loves strawberries and pigeons, and they are vegan for the animals, owning many, including fifty water snails. For the past three years, they have been working on their first fiction book about non-binarity, human-eating creatures and addiction.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Addiction has been in my family for generations. For many years, I have wondered why so many of my family members struggle or struggled with it. Watching my brother succumb to his addiction has been the most difficult thing in my life.

A feeling of powerlessness about the vicious circle of lives marked by addiction, coupled with frustration, has impelled in me an ever greater need to understand the effect of relationships and the role of parents, their own addictions and life choices on the future of their progeny. How difficult or possible is it to break out of the vicious circle? I want to penetrate deeper into fragmented family structures while maintaining a focus on concrete people. It's the story of my family, but my story and aim is to mediate an understanding of what it means to grow up in a family affected by addiction and violence. Using our example, I want to explore the consequences of addiction within a family, intergenerational transmission of trauma and predispositions to addiction, which apply to an enormous number of people.

In an age when addiction rapidly spreads across the globe (US opioid epidemic, rising alcoholism and drug use among young people in Europe...), I believe it is vital to present this issue through the lens of research and views provided by contemporary psychology. The addiction epidemic takes a heavy toll on the social, public security and health systems. In a world of looming uncertainty (parallel wars, ecological crisis, inflation and a society divided economically and socially), pain experienced in families amplifies and is passed further down.