By Ryan Keating-Lambert
The Czech Republic’s first National Film Museum finally gets off the ground with a move to a permanent location, and a fundraiser at Prague International Film Festival Febiofest.
Febiofest raised a total of 10 000 Kč in donations for the NaFilM museum from tickets sold this year, which will help contribute to a new exhibition.
This is not the first time the film festival has supported the film museum project, which initially began as a series of temporary exhibitions.
‘The decision was not difficult; we wanted to support something that didn’t yet exist in the Czech Republic, and also wanted to encourage festival guests to add a museum visit to their festival programme’ said Febiofest spokesperson Gabriela Vágner.
After a successful crowdfunding campaign and support from Czech filmmakers like Zdeněk Svěrák, Jiří Menzel, and Jan Hřebejk, the museum has moved to a permanent location at architect Jan Kotěra’s historical ‘Mozarteum’ on Jungmannova Street in Prague’s city centre.
Today the museum offers visitors a chance to not only learn about film history, but also interact with a permanent exhibition where both children and adults can try out filmmaking technology like cameras, virtual reality, sound recording, and even multimedia projectors.
The NaFilM museum began five years ago when undergraduate film students Terezie Krizkovska, Adela Mrazova and Jakub Jiriste discovered a significant gap in the still underrepresented film and media education curriculum in Czech schools.
‘We started to wonder why the Czech Republic didn’t have a film museum – a place where people could learn more about film history, especially if you consider how rich the Czech film history is and that a film museum wasn’t anything unusual in other countries,’ said the now museum curator and manager Terezie Krizkovska.
The museum will now join the ranks of other celebrated European film museums including The Cinema Museum in London and the EYE in Amsterdam.
To visit and support NaFilM National Film Museum, visit the official website.
Feature photo: NaFilM
