The reconstruction of Fotoatelier Seidel, a photography studio in Český Krumlov, and the reappearance of a unique collection of almost 140,000 historic photographs provide not only a springboard for telling the moving story of two photographers – father and son – but also a way of bringing home to us lives lived long ago, and the lost culture of the Bohemian Forest borderlands. It encourages us to ruminate on photography in general, not just as historical evidence but also as a means of experiencing and remembering. It was January 2006. At that time the pulse of the Seidel family’s life still lingered in the silent building with its Secession studio, and the future appeared uncertain, just like the first uncertain spring flight of the bees in frosty days. In the course of the three years spent filming, people who had once worked at the studio and those whose family history is linked with the place gathered there. They are people from both sides of the border who still remember Franz Seidel and his wife, people whose testimony is extremely personal and reaches back to the time just after World War II. The photographs found in Josef Seidel’s studio are priceless evidence of an epoch, mementos of a destroyed culture, shaped for centuries by the natural landscape of the Bohemian Forest borderlands. They are also becoming a bond between people on both sides of the Czech-German frontier who are striving to save a common cultural inheritance.

Writer / Karel Čtveráček    DoP / Karel Čtveráček , Jan Horáček , Jakub Šimůnek    Editor / Šárka Sklenářová    Sound / Jakub Jurásek

Release date / 19 October 2009

Photogallery