The Ark of Fools

A Czech film by the Slovak director Ivan Balaďa based on the short story by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov Ward No. 6, which was among the films whose production began in the late 1960s, but they had to be finished in 1990 after the Velvet Revolution because of a ban. – A whole spectrum of human characters and figures are living in an abandoned hospital – perhaps a former farmstead – in a non-specified Russian governorate. The patients marked by the society as mentally ill are placed in Ward no. 6. The institution is lead by an old head doctor Andrey Ragin, an internally broken man who is aware of his defeat in life. He grows close with a young patient named Ivan Gromov suffering from persecution mania. However, Gromov's opinions are actually based on a certain logic and maybe they are not as far from reality as they seem... (MFFK Febiofest)