Jana Ševčíková

Piemule is about an ethnic group of Czechs which settled over a hundred and fifty years ago in the hills not far from Timisoara. The acenstor’s of today’s inhabitants, craftsmen and farmers, came to the Romanian highlands around the year 1822 with their families for work and livehood. The filmming began in 1980 and proceeded for several years under difficult conditions. Jana Sevcikova captured the way of life of one emote village though the changing seasons and religious ceremonies or social and work rituals (Christmas, carnivals, Easter,wedings, harvest and the ploughing of the land).She presents individual people their customs, behavior and opinions. Employing a complex structure of compositions, the film depicts the social aspects of this small enclave foreign to Romania, it’s history as well as the moral depth of the people. Isolated from a foreign world this community has kept it’s language, culture and also a feeling for national identity.

• Čadca Festival of ethnographic and doc.films, CZ, 1984 - First Prize For Film and Direction
• London Film Festival, 1992
• Margaret Mead Film Festival, NY, 1992
• Pacific Film Archives, 1992
• Smithsonian, National Museum of Natural History, 1993
• Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1993
• Cinema in Transition, NY, 1993
• Olympia Film Festival, Olympia, WA, 1993
• San Francisco Int. Film Festival, 1993
• Field Museum Chicago, 1993
• Gyor Mediawave Festival, Hungary, 1994 - Prize in Minority Category
• Alter-native Film Festival Turgu Mures,Romania, 1994 - Prize for Best Documentary
• Society for Visual Anthropology, Atlanta, 1994

Documentary films by
Jana Ševčíková: