The Mass

The mass is a distillation of human evolution, a parable about the treatment of substance, an image of the control over bodies that are hanged on the world’s tissue, or else disgorged from the ocean mass onto dry land, which is interwoven with bodies and the movement of hunters, gatherers, and vagabonds. Our observation of the various forms of abstracted masses, which we become part of at the same time, creates a platform of eternal presence – an active void if you will, which revolves in a closed circle, as though it had neither beginning nor end. What is left is just the stark presence of the traces of bared lives.

  • Ivo Bystřičan
    Director
  • Michal Pavlásek
    Director
  • Ivo Bystřičan
    Producer
  • Michal Pavlásek
    Producer
  • Václav Flegl, Sounderground
    Producer
  • Ivo Bystřičan
    Writer
  • Michal Pavlásek
    Writer
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short
  • Genres:
    visual essay
  • Runtime:
    30 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    January 25, 2017
  • Production Budget:
    10,000 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Czech Republic
  • Country of Filming:
    Greece, Turkey
  • Language:
    Arabic, English, Modern Greek (1453-)
  • Shooting Format:
    digital HD
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Moscow International Festival of Visual Anthropology
    Moscow
    Russian Federation
    May 20, 2017
    Official Selection
  • World Film Festival
    Tartu
    Estonia
    March 21, 2018
    Official selection
Distribution Information
  • Ivo Bystřičan, Michal Pavlasek
    Country: Czech Republic
    Rights: All Rights
Director Biography - Ivo Bystřičan, Michal Pavlásek

Michal Pavlásek is social anthropologist, university teacher, freelance journalist and documentarist, Turkish coffee lover, researcher at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Co-founder of Anthropictures - flexible association of social scientists providing independent field research. In his research focuses on migration and multuculturalism. He is author of movies Searching for the Exit (2016), Another Vojvodovo: thinking in pictures (2013), Time Bows Beneath the Burden of the Grapes. The Past, Czechs and Germans in the Serbian Banat (2012).

Ivo Bystřičan is documentary filmmaker, story-editor and screenwriter. He directed several feature documentary films like Copper Age (2010), My Last 150 000 Cigarettes (2013), Byeway (2014), Mr. Chytil´s Crime (2014), Middle Dusk (2015) and many others. He graduated from sociology at Masaryk University in Brno and documentary filmmaking at FAMU in Prague.

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