Tomáš Škrdlant

Tomáš Škrdlant — curriculum vitae

Born in 1943, he studied film directing at FAMU from 1962 to 1966. During the cultural liberalization of 1968, he made three documentary films at the Army Film Studio (ČAF): POTOMCI (portraits of nonconformist young people of the time, co-authored with Angelika Hannauerová), POZŮSTALOST 38 (a meeting of the builders and defenders of the border fortifications thirty years later), and MOST (the genius loci of contemporary Ostrava confronted with the recollections of its liberator in 1945). In 1994, the authors of POTOMCI followed it with the documentary VLASATÝ STÁT UPROSTŘED HOLOHLAVÉ REPUBLIKY for Film & Sociology.

During the years of communist censorship (the so-called normalization), he worked primarily on television documentaries about sport and motoring, where it was easier to find problematic subjects without a direct political context: doping, the ecological effects of individual motoring, the private car as a social fetish, and more.

Since 1990, he has made more than 100 authored documentaries, mainly on ecological, psychological, and sociological themes, for Czech Television, Original Videojournal, Channel Four TV, the Film & Sociology Association, and other independent productions.

In 1996, he published the book Demokracie přírody and, at Masaryk University in Brno, led seminars on nonlinear thinking until 2009.

He co-authored the book Skrytá pravda země — Živly jako archetypy ekologického myšlení (Zdeněk Neubauer, Tomáš Škrdlant, Mladá Fronta, Kolumbus edition, 2005; second revised edition, Malvern, 2021).