‘Broken Voices' Dissects a Toxic Environment in All Its Complexity, Inspired by a Girls' Choir Sexual Abuse Scandal Long Before #MeToo

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'An exclusive world, in which desirable prestige goes hand in hand with premature coming of age.' That is how the website of the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) summarizes some of the conflicting factors that lead to, and enable, the traumatic in psychological drama Broken Voices (Sbormistr), the new film from Czech writer and director Ondřej Provazník (Old-Timers, A Town Called Hermitage) that world premieres in the fest's main Crystal Globe Competition on Sunday, July 6.
The cast of the Czech-Slovak co-production includes Juraj Loj (Agnieska Holland's Charlatan) and an ensemble of mostly non-professional actors, led by Kateřina Falbrová. Other cast members include Maya Kintera, Zuzana Šulajová, Marek Cisovský, Ivana Wojtylová and Barrandov Studio.
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'It's the early 1990s, and 13-year-old Karolína, a gifted novice singer, is given the chance to become a member of a world-famous girls' choir,' reads a synopsis that turns darker when it mentions that 'Karolína's exceptional talent has caught the attention of the formidable and much-admired choirmaster.'
Even ahead of its world premiere, the drama, whose Czech release via CinemArt is set for July 10 and for which Salaud Morissetis is handling world sales, has been highly anticipated in the Czech Republic, drawing attention and magazine covers. The reason: It calls to mind 'the notorious case of Bambini di Praga, but also other devastating situations involving the clash of innocence and abusive authority,' as the KVIFF site notes.
The famous Bambini di Praga girls' choir was a household name in the country and was for many years led by Bohumil Kulínský Jr., who took over from his father. In 2004, Kulínský Jr. was arrested and charged with various acts of sexual abuse of minors, with a tally of 49 victims between 1984 and 2004. In 2008, he was sentenced to three years in prison with parole, which was later extended to five and a half years in prison, a sentence that he started serving in January 2009. In June 2011, shortly after Kulínský's conditional release from prison, Bambini di Praga was shuttered. Kulínský died in September 2018.
So much of this story happened well before the hashtag #MeToo started coming into broader public view in 2017. 'When #MeToo started, it came back to me, and I said this is something very important for Czech society, and I think that there's material in this for a movie,' Provazník recalls to THR. 'So, I started doing lots of research and interviews with former choir girls, watching things etc, and I started to work on the script.'
Provazník approaches the difficult themes and topics raised in the film 'without sensationalism,' as the KVIFF website highlights, and with much sensitivity, which he says his first-time actors needed to feel safe and flourish. 'I had to change a lot of things during the shooting to make it safe for them. We were really focusing on the safety and environment for all the actresses and for all the parents, and making sure they understood what the script was about,' the writer-director recalls. 'We knew I had to do it all in such a way that it would not traumatize our 13-year-old lead actress and the others.'
In a lot of scenes, power imbalances, competitive spirits, jealousy and more are hinted at through camera work, framing, looks, gestures and movements. 'I really like to tell stories gently and to only give the audience hints or some signs, because it provokes the imagination and thinking,' explains the director. 'So, my aim from the beginning was to do that and to tell a story that even a broader audience can understand.'
This was more than a storytelling style choice, though. 'I think that it's somehow imprinted in all these scandals and cases when they come out later, 15, 20 years after. There's always some kind of mystery hidden in it. Not everybody knows everything,' highlights Provazník. 'Most people always only know part of the information. People guess some. Somebody knows more, somebody less. And this lack of full information and this mystery is what I wanted to put into the story.'
In the Bambini di Praga scandal, for example, some girls and parents sided with the choirmaster and praised him.
The filmmaker originally wanted to write the script from the point of view the older sister. 'It just didn't work, and I didn't know why, because I thought there was interesting drama in her, because she has a mix of jealousy, but also wants to protect the younger girl,' he says 'But they are in a prestigious club. And the older sister is already there, but the younger one is an outsider in the beginning. So when I changed the point of view, the story developed smoothly.'
Not that the two sisters' perspectives aren't both being explored. 'I knew exactly at every point what the older sister knows, or what happened to her, and I somehow tried to secretly imprint that in the film,' Provazník reveals. 'So there are some hints about what has happened or happens to the older sister.'
Through the sister and other characters, the movie also explores how various people can sustain or enable a toxic system. 'That's a very important part of the story, because when you are a teenager, you just don't know the consequences. Even as an adult, sometimes you don't know the consequences of the group that you're part of,' says Provazník. 'Of course, the main villain is obvious. But I wanted to portray this environment in all its complexity and not simple black-and-white morals. The main villain is clear, but the task for an artist is to also find some inner truth, some deeper truth.'
Audiences won't guess that Broken Voices lead actress Kateřina Falbrová doesn't have an acting background. The director picked a singer by design. 'She was totally a non-actor. It was the system I wanted to use from the beginning,' says Provazník. 'I want to play the real music and songs. My audience experience with many films with choirs or orchestras is that when the music starts, meaning the playback starts, the power of the film goes down 50 percent for me. So I wanted all the music scenes in the film to be live and without playback.'
After six to seven years of work on Broken Voices, Provazník says, 'it's very exhausting but very satisfying at the same time to make this film.' What is next for him? 'Recently, I started to write a new story,' he says. 'It's about a university professor who goes to the Alps with 10 of his students for an anthropology seminar, and they are following the traces of the Ötzi,' sometimes also called The Iceman, a man whose mummy was discovered at the Austrian-Italian border in 1991. The man is estimated to have lived between 3350 and 3105 BC. 'It is the oldest detective story as nobody knows who killed him. And so there are these parallels between this 5,000-year-old murder and the professor who has problems that are somehow catching up with him in the mountains.'
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