Katka By Helena Trestikova

In the first scene, Katya introduces some of her friends in rehab to her fictional alter-ego, Katka, in order to illustrate her heroin addiction. She talks about her dependence, and then discusses with the filmmaker about the difficulty of quitting. The addiction is the first and practically the only information we really have about the protagonist, who follows an inevitable and gradual decline during thirteen years, getting deeper and deeper into the need for psychotropics. She loses her job, her boyfriend and even the right to keep her newborn baby. By the end of the film, we’ve seen dozens of scenes of Katya shooting up, even directly on her pregnant belly.

Apart from that, the world around this woman is inexistent. Her family is barely mentioned, and neither are her childhood, friends or other people from the community where she lives. Katya is Czech, but she could come from anywhere, since she seems to have no connection with her environment. Most of all, we never really know how director Helena Trestikova managed to convince this woman to be filmed during so many years. We don’t know if she ever helped her, if they became friends, or if one of them wanted to quit the filming process for a while. We don’t know what interest these two women have in each other, and therefore, we can’t really understand how the story started and where it intends to go. The film’s discourse is hidden from us.

Without the psychology and the sociology, we are given some powerful, but silent, observations of this woman. Aesthetically, nothing is proposed that could drive our attention away from Katya’s face while she’s crying or tripping. The camera is precisely positioned, the character is in the middle and the photography is as natural as possible. Katka proposes a cold, balanced observation of a disturbed and pathological life, and one could hardly tell how to feel in front of such stark images.

By Bruno Carmelo