2009, color & BW, 124 min., 16 mm > video

An experimental documentary structured by the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. A search for the beginning through analogy, landscape, myth, history, and signs found across the Czech Republic, the land of the Lion.

The film follows a simple but demanding principle: its script is based on the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The alphabet begins — that is, the beginning — with the letter aleph, which gives the film its title. In older traditions, Hebrew letters were not only sounds, but also images: aleph as bull, beth as house, gimel as camel, and so on. The film takes these inherited figures as points of departure and searches for them again in Bohemia, the land of the Lion.

Each letter corresponds to an image, a figure, or a situation discovered in the Czech landscape and social reality. These elements emerge one by one and gradually form the film’s movement and inner logic. Rather than telling a story in a conventional way, the film unfolds through analogy, association, and montage.

Shot in 2008, it also absorbs the resonance of the Czech “years ending in eight”: 1918, 1938, 1948, 1968, allowing historical time to enter the structure of the film. What appears is not a thesis, but a field of correspondences: Mount Říp, Počátky, military grounds, burial sites, spiritual gestures, meals, ruins, songs, animals, and people.

The Beginning and the Lion is a film about searching for origin not as a single point, but as a pattern that keeps reappearing in different forms. Its main method is editing through resemblance, tension, and unexpected proximity.

Nominated for the A. N. Stankovič Prize, 2009

Storyboard of the film:

Featuring:

kabbalist Ladislav Moučka, astrophysicist Jiří Grygar, biologist Jiří Sádlo, theologian Milan Balabán, writer Otomar Dvořák, artist Karolína Heřmánková, political activist Jan Šinágl, actor Vladimír Čech, comparatist Vendula Neumannová, antiquarian Lubomír Samek, archaeologist Jiří Vávra, polyglot Jaroslav Formánek, dean Michal Stehlík, guru Tomáš Pfeifer, as well as fishermen, firemen, grandmothers, cavers, archers, camels, and others.

Texts about the film by Ondřej Sýkora and Otomar Dvořák.

Other posters:

First 9 minutes of the film