I was born in Hradec Králové, Czechoslovakia, to a Czech mother and a Finnish father. I spent my childhood with my parents and older siblings in Tampere, southern Finland. As a child, I liked to read comics, which, I believe, later influenced my approach to visual storytelling. During my studies in electrical engineering in Prague, I started to be interested in film and spent a lot of time in cinemas. After my graduation, I shot several short films where I used to cast my friends; later, I also started to work with actors, often fresh graduates or students of the theatre academy. Nevertheless, I still like to cast non-actors and deal with improvisation to achieve a more authentic expression. My feature debut is a musical-poetic film, Piano at the Crossroads, which was made during the coronavirus pandemic and is linked to my short films by a certain isolation of the main characters, reflecting the individual’s loneliness amid modern society.