Czech filmmaker Beata Parkanová’s Tiny Lights world premiered this week in the Crystal Globe competition at Karlovy Vary film festival.
The film centres around six-year-old Amálka (Mia Banko) who hears snippets of her family bickering. Taken to spend an afternoon with her grandparents, she soon discovers that her mother wants to move away from the rest of the family.
Parkanová began her career writing novels and children’s books and then graduated from Czech film school FAMU in 2015. Her debut feature Moments premiered at Karlovy Vary in 2018. Her sophomore effort Word played in main competition at Karlovy Vary in 2022, winning the best director and actor prizes.
Tiny Lights is a Czech and Slovak co-production between Prague based companies love.FRAME and Bontonfilm alongside Slovakian outfit Azyl Production. World Sales are handled by Reason8.
How did the idea for the film first spark within you?
I wrote the first version of the script in 2018 and then it took me a lot of work to capture the exact shape of Tiny Lights. But the feeling, the building block in me, must have been laid sometime much earlier - as the story is inspired by my own experiences. I was often alone as a child and also went through the crisis of my parent’s marriage.
You tell the story from the perspective of a six-year-old - how did you find Mia Banko and were you apprehensive about working with a young actress?
I first saw Mia when we were casting a girl for my previous feature The Word. She came to accompany her older sister Lea, who ended up playing a little girl named Ema in The Word. Mia was tiny then, maybe four years old, but I remembered her. Some years later, when the question of how we were going to find Amálka was put before us, I told the producer that I knew who was going to play the role, that there was no need to do another casting call. I consider that a little miracle. Working with Mia was completely professional, we didn’t lie to or manipulate an unknowing little child. She learned her lines and rehearsed along with the other actors ahead of the shoot. She behaved just as another professional actress, even though she had no prior filming experience. And I found her the best person to work with. Absolutely open and connected.
Was the film rigidly scripted or did you allow for improvisation?
You don’t improvise with me. Mia had learned the exact dialogue and situations. But the script editor of the film, Meir Lubor Dohnal, told me something before the shooting that impressed me deeply: “Be very perceptive and attentive when shooting with a child, sometimes it happens that the film speaks to you through her and gives you something wonderful that you wouldn’t have thought of“. That’s the exact gift you get. And Mia made up a song like that, a melody that Amálka sings all day long and we worked with it also with composer Michal Novinski and actress Elizaveta Maximová who plays the mother.
Tell us about the location. It’s very timeless, and there’s a clash between fantasy, memory and reality in this place that seems slightly idyllic.
I wished that the location did not clearly refer to a depicted time but could easily become a place of childhood for any of us. And I think we accomplished that. And its idyllic nature then hints at what the family is outwardly experiencing on any given day. That served my intention to depict the collision of inner and outer worlds.
It’s a very immediate and urgent film, taking place over the course of a day with the ebbs and flows of a child’s life. Did it take a long time to shoot or was it a quick process?
My shootings are always quick, but I insist on perfect preparations – we did a lot of rehearsal readings with actors, there were long discussions with DOP, sound designer and set designers. This time we shot the film chronologically so that it would be easier for Mia to understand Amálka’s connections and feelings as they developed during the day.
You’ve won at Karlovy Vary before with previous film The Word. How do you think the win helped with his film especially in terms of funding and recognition?
I started shooting one week after Karlovy Vary. The awards for The Word kicked off a long festival run for the film and I was simply overjoyed by the whole success. Honest, pure joy. I was also recognised by the international press that helps a lot in promotion of my projects in development. Reason8 as a sales agent stepped up into Tiny Lights. I think that after the awards people start to believe in me bit more.
What are planning on working on next?
We’re preparing my fourth film, The Bears. It will consist of five short stories, each with a different female lead in the main role. Different settings, different characters, same theme. So it’s going to be something different again. After a film starring a child and a cat, we’re going for different characters and faces, but the desire to capture the same intensity stays.
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