previously published on Cineuropa
Virtually every country in the world has at least one music act that pretty much everybody there knows and loves, and which lasts through the ages either by being consistent or by constantly reinventing itself. For the Czech Republic, this “one” band could be Tata Bojs, the members of which have been gracing stages since the late 1980s, constantly reinventing themselves, but staying faithful to their artsy approach to pop and rock music. The band has now got its own documentary, Tatabojs.doc, directed by experienced filmmaker Marek Najbrt, best known for his works Protektor (2009) and Polski Film (2012). The premiere took place at the Karlovy Vary IFF, as a Special Screening.
The history of Tata Bojs is an eventful one, but is pretty much devoid of turmoil and conflict. The band was founded by two life-long friends from the Hanspaulka neighbourhood of Prague, Marek Hunat/Mardoša (on bass guitar) and Milan Cais (on drums and vocals), as the final incarnation of the projects they had been involved in since elementary school. A string of guitarists passed through the band, while the keyboards, samplers, additional vocals and drums were added progressively as the group went through various phases. Tata Bojs started as an infantile teen punk-rock band that gained the general public’s attention and was one of the few to survive the transition from the drab late-socialist 1980s to the more liberated 1990s.
Since the design of the cover for their first album, the visual arts have been an important part of their expression and shows. Their second album, Futuretro, traced the general outline of their musical explorations in combining pop, rock and electronic influences, while their fourth, Nanoalbum (2004), was part of a wider artistic project involving Nanobook and the Nanotour DVD (2005), which earned Tata Bojs the national Anděl Award for Best Group. The band continued to experiment with their expression on later albums, remaining one of the most appreciated acts in the country.
We get to see all of this in a series of behind-the-scenes observations, as well as interviews with band members, the musicians’ parents, friends, collaborators and fans, lensed competently by Jan Baset Střitežský, plus archival footage from the concerts as well as from the musicians’ home collections. This is further spiced up by some animated intermezzos edited into the fabric of the film in snappy fashion by Petra Maceridu. However, Najbrt and his co-writer, Robert Geisler, wanted to make something more than a basic music documentary that celebrates the lengthy career of a beloved band and the friendship between its members. So, they introduced a “film within a film” series of sequences featuring men in space suits, which is close to the type of act the band would use for their concert choreography or music videos. It adds a little “something” to the documentary’s dynamism, but it is still not enough to qualify Tatabojs.doc as a completely “outside the box” documentary.
In the end, Tatabojs.doc is a decent piece of work that does justice to the band, and their music, art and friendship, but it preaches to the converted because the band itself is quite hard not to like. However, the film’s reach will be limited to the Czech Republic and maybe some of the neighbouring countries where Tata Bojs might be a bit of “a thing”, as the band’s music and art, and the film itself, are not that easy to translate into another context, and thus it will not win over any new international fans.