Pohyby Jana Calábka

This Czech Television documentary introduces Jan Calabek, professor of botany from Brno, as seen by his friends, colleagues and family. In his work he focused on monitoring and recording the movements of plants. Using time-lapse photography, he aimed to explain the patterns of their growth. Working in laboratory conditions was very challenging and required thorough preparation. The filming sometimes took thousands of hours. Later, he used his films for scientific and educational purposes and to promote science. Calabek’s time-lapse documentaries are a unique source of information about plants. He was a pioneer of this type of documentary in the Czech Republic; he devoted 60 years of his life to these documentaries. The unique combination of growing plants and lyrical music makes the film scientific and experimental at the same time. That is partly why he achieved worldwide recognition and earned many awards at international festivals. Time-lapse documentaries showing the growth of plants in several seconds also made an impact on biology classes, where his documentaries are widely used to this day. (Academia Film Olomouc)