08/07/2022 - Lila Schwarzenberg approaches the biography of her famous father Karel through the lens of their often-strained relationship

"There are periods in history where we see one chapter ending and a new one beginning." In the opening of My Father, The Prince [+see also:
interview: Lukas Sturm, Lila Schwarzen…
film profile], which celebrated its world premiere in the Special Screenings section of the 56^th Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Karel Schwarzenberg’s speech from 2014 is referring to the invasion of Russia in Crimea. Painfully contemporary, it is a coincidental fit to modern geopolitics as it is to the subject of the movie itself.

Schwarzenberg, Bohemian nobility, Beneš decrees refugee, repatriate, European, politician, statesman, hero of the Velvet revolution and father figure simply known as "the Prince" to the Czech people, has seen many periods come and go. In his own life, on the European continent and in the country he calls home. His filmmaker daughter Lila Schwarzenberg and her colleague Lukas Sturm try to capture this manifoldness by lensing it through a complicated father-daughter relationship – one of love, yet emotional distance, as he was a father figure to a nation yet often missing from his own offspring's life.

The narrative of Schwarzenberg's biography is told less through a straightforward recounting of events, than through a loose but carefully choreographed assembly of scenes in which father and daughter interact. Shot for five years from 2016 to 2021, the two Schwarzenbergs revisit not only the past of their memories but also the various properties of their family, castles and palaces in Bohemia, Prague, Vienna and Styria. They are places of recollection, of growing up, of ties to a land that expelled one for 41 years, only to offer to return during the end of communism in 1989 and find purpose at a point in time, when reconciliation was hanging in the air.

"It was the best time of my life," Schwarzenberg tells his daughter of the revolution. After decades of living up to his role as the heir as well as producing one, returning to the land of his birth is a major milestone in Schwarzenberg's life – one that, his daughter says, inspired her research into her father's past. But it is not those moments of historical grandeur, which can be looked up in any history book, that make up the essence of the movie. It is the connection between the two family members, the obvious tension and the emotion that keeps coming through the screen. Sturm and Schwarzenberg opt not to present a polished version of their protagonist. They look behind the curtains, creating film-within-a-film moments, digging into the myth, taking it apart and reassembling it with a delicate intimacy. "I am too lazy for having to pretend," Schwarzenberg says of his personality. His daughter and Sturm take him up on that.

B-Footage of Lila Schwarzenberg trying to convince her father to take a walk on the castle grounds to have more active scenes results in a discussion of mobility and age. At another point, there is an obvious glance of the father at his watch. "Do you have to be somewhere," the daughter asks. "We still have an hour,” he responds. Not being one of his closest confidants, as Schwarzenberg puts it, and yet trying to get through to him creates a fascinating point of view. The tale of a father and a daughter, a tale of forgiveness, a tale of finding peace and answers that even relates to those far beyond the prestigious and wealthy means of the Schwarzenberg family.

At the end of the day, there is always the human factor. And finding the humanity and the complexity in such a larger-than-life person is the real key to preserving someone for the next generation, may it be for Czechs or for Lila Schwarzenberg’s children, than any history book will ever be able to.

My Father, The Prince was produced by Sabotage Films and co-produced by Neulandfilm & Medien GmbH and Thought Engine. It is distributed by Bontonfilm, a.s.