Director Tomáš Lunák will be a special guest at the screening to introduce the film and take part in a Q and A.
Special thanks to Yume Pictures
‘Alois Nebel’ (Tomáš Lunák, 2011)
Inspired by classic film noir and rendered in mesmerising black-and-white rotoscope, this dark-hearted Czech film traces the haunted memories and mysterious visions of a troubled train dispatcher through the shifting cultural and political landscape at the close of the Cold War. It’s the summer of 1989, shortly before the Berlin Wall comes down, and Alois Nebel is working as a train dispatcher at a small railway station in the mountainous region of Sudetenland on the Czechoslovakian border. Nebel, a loner who suffers from troubling hallucinations, is psychically stalked by ghosts from the dark past of this region, where harsh revenge was exacted on the German population after World War II. Unable to shake these nightmares, he eventually ends up in a sanatorium. When he recovers and is allowed to leave, Nebel finds things have changed dramatically outside.
The Berlin Wall is gone, the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia has fallen, and he is without a job or a place to stay. Initially seeking help at the Prague railway headquarters, Nebel ultimately returns to the mountains to fight through the ghostly miasma that has haunted him for so long.
Alois Nebel is a sophisticated and serious-minded reflection on recent history that is technically stunning in its use of seductive black and white rotoscope animation.
Czech Republic/Germany/Slovakia, 84’00
Director Biography
Tomáš Lunák studied animation direction at the Zím Film School and at Prague Film Faculty FAMU. Since graduating, he has directed a number of music videos and promotional films. Alois Nebel is his feature film debut.
