Jakub

Nobody knows exactly when he died. But when asked about Jakub, the residents of his village are happy to show how he walked and talked. In this ethnographic study, filmed in gritty black-and-white, Jakub’s war-torn life story is used as a metaphor for the marginalized Ruthenian community. In telling their sometimes contradictory stories about him, the villagers create an oral history of their people.

The lives of the Ruthenians in the Maramureș Mountains in northern Romania and the Sudetenland in Bohemia were shaped by the historical events of the 19th and 20th centuries. Their village is located in the Maramureș region, whose borders have been redrawn repeatedly, notably after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the end of the Second World War, the villagers had to move to the Sudetenland.

Jana Ševčíková filmed the Ruthenians over a period of four years. In intense close-ups, they tell stories about their national identity and the importance of having a home. Sometimes the camera wanders over the landscape, conveying a sense of the people’s displacement.