Martin Klusák: Princess In The Iron Mask

The first inspiration to me was the Memorial to the Victims of Communism which was built in 2006 in Liberec. The Memorial is in fact a mirror whose shape and placement resemble the monolith from Kubricks’ film 2001: Space Odyssey.” On the ground in front of the memorial is an engraved text, reversed as if it was a mirror image, and the text can be read in the reflection of the mirror surface: “Search in yourself whether you protect freedom, revere it, or hamper it.”

Another inspiration, more significant though, were stories of North Korea refugees which were published in a lengthy article in the National Geographic, dated February 2009 – and especially the 2006 reports of the sociologist Marie Jelínková about North Korea women in the Czech Republic, as well as an interview with the author.

While the Liberec Memorial influenced the composition formally and thematically, the texts about North Korea people served as a guide for the construction of the specific points of the story.

I have chosen the form of radio fiction with a reduced amount of dialogue. My template for the form is the non-verbal sound cinematography, i.e. films in which the leading dramatic role is given to other means of film speech rather than to words – camera shots, the set-up of the scene, action, cut, sound etc. Although the composition does contain dialogues, I endeavor to withdraw from the traditional verbal approach of a radio play, and by means of mere sound I try to convey the imagination of a film image and story.

I was also inspired by a contemporary popular genre of docudrama (documentary fiction) in which the authorial aesthetics is achieved by the director’s purposeful manipulating or influencing the recorded reality without necessarily letting know the viewer of what he is doing.