WE ARE NEVER ALONE

A highway runs through a small Czech village. It’s summer and time seems to have stopped. Nothing here but a lone convenience store where taciturn Jana mans the counter. Her husband’s a hypochondriac, her oldest son has a learning disability, her father won’t speak a word with her or his grandkids. Into this grey, hermetically sealed world stumbles the pimp Milan with the woman he adores, the perma-drunk stripper Sylva, and proceeds to turn Jana’s world upside down. She immediately resolves to conquer the reluctant Roma’s heart and reintroduce some colour into her drab daily existence, but Milan seems little interested in her advances. At the same time, her husband strikes up a friendship with the new neighbour, a paranoid prison guard and gun freak. Her kids start spending time with the neighbour kids too and together they make a pact against their fathers. It’s every man for himself – there’re no fellow humans, only the humans next door, whose actions have consequences for everybody. With WE ARE NEVER ALONE, Petr Václav has managed to make a film about today’s Europe which succeeds equally as a black comedy and cryptic fairy tale. Shot both in black and white and colour and graced with odd characters, the longing for love and the fear of one’s self and others are the true protagonists here.