International Competition

‘Why has my shitty life turned out like this? No-one knows. Not even God. God’s on holiday and he’s reading porn’ – an excerpt from Diary of the Forgotten, the journal kept by the main protagonist in the film. With raw authenticity, the director records the luckless fate of René over a period of twenty years as he yo-yos between prison and freedom. The life of René, who successfully stylises himself in the role of a desperado, unfolds against a backdrop of important political events occurring in the Czech Republic and beyond its borders. The Velvet Revolution, the presidential election, 9/11 and the Czech Republic’s accession to the EU - all this is ‘digested’ by René mostly from the confines of various prisons. The film also traces the director’s intriguing relationship with her ‘subject of study’, who sometimes feels like a prostitute selling his life story for filthy lucre, but for whom the visits from the film crew are often his only solace.