On Monday, the Slovak film The Line, included in the Competition, was presented by the largest delegation so far. The new film by director Peter Bebjak takes place among smugglers at the Slovak-Ukrainian border and the two countries also co-operated, for the first time ever, in film production. “Shooting of the film was difficult, especially due to complications arising from the Schengen Area border, where a truck with the necessary technical equipment sometimes got stuck for fourteen hours. Moreover, the whole region around the border lacks basic infrastructure, there are no hotels and no catering. Nonetheless, our Ukrainian partners did a great job and we are currently contemplating further co-operation,” producer Wanda Adamík Hrycová stated at the press conference; she also recommended a visit to the beautiful town of Kyiv.
The tough story of the The Line, told in the form of a thriller encompassing certain aspects of other genres, was inspired by actual cases. “Basically, everything portrayed in the film actually happened, only to various people on both sides of the boarder. We had conducted extensive search before the screenplay was written, we had interviewed smugglers and policemen and had learned many weird stories from them,” Hrycová explained.
Her father, actor Andrej Hryc, was assigned the most negative character in the story, a corrupted policeman. Renowned Slovak actress Emílie Vášáryová and several of her students of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava were given parts in the film, which will be screened in Czech and Slovak cinemas in the summer of 2017. Indeed, director Bebjak is also a former student of the Vášáryová, as he graduated also as an actor.
