Czech Film Center

Synopsis

Vacha’s Chechen family had to escape from their country because of war and permanent persecution. Finally they get to a Czech refugee camp and start the long process of gaining political asylum. It seems as if they are at the end of a long journey to freedom, but here the problems have just begun. Our main Czech “heroes” Tomáš and Markéta, who have quite ordinary problems with their relationships and work and so on… are in fact wellestablished – he is a successful actor in a small theatre, she is a young doctor doing her research work into new forms of anesthetic in a big hospital. They meet each other fatally one night when similar things happen to both of them. It provokes a discussion about good and evil in life and a reflection on what will happen because of it. Together they start to play a game trying find out if good and evil strike back in this life or not. Tomáš is in the role of an evil person and Markéta plays a good person. In the beginning it seems quite innocent and amusing but later on it also infiltrates the lives of other people and especially the destiny of Vacha’s family, who really did not want to be a part of this game, which gets tougher and tougher. In the end it has fatal consequences for all of them. The whole movie is about the encounter of differently positioned cultures and people with real problems and “non-real” problems, though in the end all of them suddenly become real. There is no difference between people trying to survive in horrible conditions and well situated Europeans. The only important thing is the desire to search, to take life like as a puzzle which sometimes fits and sometimes not, but when we give up searching, we begin to die. Also in the Puzzle game one of the elements doesn’t fit at all… but this is maybe what life is about…