Czech writer-director Ondřej Provazník was sitting in a bar one evening in 2004 while attending Prague’s renowned film and television school FAMU when he heard a group of women singing in beautiful, choral voices to a man on their mobile phone. At the time, he couldn’t help but overhear who they were talking to: It was Bohumil Kulínský Jr., the former head of the famous Bambini di Praga girls’ choir who had only recently been arrested and charged for sexually abusing many of the girls in the group across a number of years.
“They were singing in these extremely beautiful, polyphonic voices into this mobile phone to him and it was this bizarre moment, which somehow highlighted the ambiguity of the whole situation,” Provazník tells Deadline at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. “On the one hand, they were part of a choir of girls who were charging him for really criminal things, and on the other hand, there were these former choir girls who were somehow very loyal to him, and they listened to him. I remember this night so well.”
But it wouldn’t be until 2017, when the #MeToo social movement and awareness campaign against sexual abuse began to ramp up, that the Czech filmmaker decided to put pen to paper to write a script for what would be Broken Voices, the feature drama which premiered at KVIFF and is competing in the Crystal Globe Competition this year.
“This trial was some kind of precursor to the #MeToo movement, and it has still shaken the Czech society,” he says. “I started to write a script, do the research work and step by step created a more fictional story loosely based on this terrible situation.”
Broken Voices is set in the early 1990s in the Czech Republic and sees 13-year-old Karolina (Kateřina Falbrová) earn a place in a world-famous girls’ choir, where she joins her older sister (Maya Kintera) and other young talents. Her voice soon catches the attention of the admired and enigmatic choirmaster Machá (Juraj Loj). Being singled out feels like a triumph for her until she begins to understand the unsettling price of that privilege and the story explores the fragile line where innocence collides with abusive power.
Provazník says he spoke with women who sat on both sides of the Bambini di Praga choir – those who spoke out against the choirmaster and those who spoke in favor of him. “I spoke with women on both sides, and I wanted an answer for myself because I wondered how they could support him so much,” he says. “And once I found the answer for myself, I thought that this is one of the mysteries of the story and then I started to build the story upon this.”
Provazník had experience in the documentary space having co-directed two feature docs – A Town Called Hermitage and Coal in the Soul – and he says his work in this arena helped inform how he approaches the fiction world. “I have sensitivity for authenticity and for real stories but also for things that are unimaginable and that say the world doesn’t always work like it should do.”
Lead actress Falbrová was part of an actual choir – so the singing in the film is her own – and Provazník admits that he originally hoped to use adult actresses for the roles of Karolina and her sister. “But when we found them, they were the same age as they were written in the script, so I had to change a lot of things in the script to keep them safe,” he says.
“We were perfectly aware from the beginning of the whole process of keeping the young girls in this film safe. From the beginning, I spoke with all the parents of the young girls. I wanted them to read the script, to know the context in which the girls were going to appear and also try to prepare them for what we can’t know – the reactions that might come after the film is released.”
Provazník opted to use camera work and subtle hints or gestures throughout the film to get the story across but says that intimacy coordinators were still used to ensure the utmost safety for everyone on set. “We knew this was a film about trauma and we had to treat this very sensitively for everyone involved,” he says. “Our main worry was not to traumatize anyone during filming.”
The music plays a huge role in the film with Provazník using Czech choir singers to sing in real time during shooting. “They are very high class and from the Prague Philharmonic Children’s Choir and are all trained singers,” he says. “We had two sound crews – one for dialogue and one for the recording of the choir. All of those singing scenes are authentic and perfectly recorded. I don’t like playback of music in a film as I feel it impacts the film negatively.”
The 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival runs until July 12.
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