Helena Třeštíková to Receive Honorary DocsBarcelona Award for Documentary Filmmaking Retrospective

The Honorary DocsBarcelona Award was created last year on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the film festival, when Spanish filmmaker Llorenç Soler received it. The festival wants to honor the most important creators of the world’s documentary film.

“The amazing and rich work of Helena Třeštíková is strongly connected with her homeland, the Czech Republic. Her films are now a legacy and a first-hand document of the last half-century of this country’s history.” said the organizers.

The Barcelona Festival will present the director’s retrospective at the Catalan Cinematheque, which will include three of her most famous titles: Katka (2010), a portrait charting fourteen years in the life of a young drug addict and her futile battle with addiction; Private Space (2012), in which Třeštíková films a Czech family for almost four decades against the background of the fall of Stalinist socialism and the entry into the European Union, and the film René – Prison of Freedom (2021), a sequel to the documentary René (2008), in which the filmmaker meets again her hero, a young man whom she filmed for twenty years in a juvenile prison.

In the past, Helena Třeštíková, who has made over fifty films, received the European Film Academy (EFA) Prix Arte 2008, the so-called European Oscar, for the film René. Helena Třeštíková also works as a teacher at FAMU in Prague.