OKO presents the screening of Annexions, which will take place on Saturday, 18 November

The screening of Annexions, which will take place on Saturday, 18 November, in the new music hall of Ostrava University in the City Campus at Černá louka, will be accompanied by a thirty-piece orchestra conducted by French conductor Jacque Mercier. Czech students (from Ostrava’s Wichterle Grammar School) and students from France and Germany participated in the film together with a professional Czech French staff under the Erasmus+ programme.

Annexions, based on a screenplay by Belgian writer Stanislas Cotton and directed by Haruna Honcoop, plays with Dadaist motifs of post-Orwellian world order in which all logic has lost its meaning. In Timelessness, a group of students finds themselves in a warped two-world, in a town whose territory and culture are engulfed by the new rules, language, and culture of a stronger, more expansive neighbor. Both the parents and their children must learn a skeletal new language and submit to an entirely new order. In the end, however, there is at least a ray of hope for a better tomorrow. The film is not so much a dystopia but an allegory to contemporary events. The entire film takes place in a stylized setting inspired by Lars von Trier’s Dogville, accompanied by the frenetic strings of Dimitri Shostakovich, and performed by a 30-piece orchestra under the baton of French conductor Jacques Mercier.

Jacques Mercier is a French conductor who has worked with soloists such as Roberto Alagna, Nicholas Angelich, Natalie Dessay, Brigitte Engerer, Françoise Pollet, Xavier Phillips, Nemanja Radulović, Abdel Rahman El Bacha, Wilhelmenia Fernandez and François Weiss.

OKO is financially supported by the State Cinematography Fund, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the Statutory City of Ostrava, and the Moravian-Silesian Region.