Rozložíš paměť

Raw Growing Up in a Small Moravian Town

A thirteen-year-old boy, Přerov, early 2000s. An environment where everyone knows everyone, but closeness often means loneliness and anxiety rather than support. An absent father, a silent mother, the authority of grandparents. Growing awareness that you are different in a place that does not accept you. A small town as a collective organism, a force that shapes a person, and a source of trauma that fuels the desire to escape. Out of fear you disappear to the big city, but the past does not leave you. Returning terrifies you. Your grandfather's death forces you back to places you wanted to leave forever. You have no choice. Perhaps you will discover that nothing matters, that you can simply overcome memories. Can you ever escape the places that shaped you?

The production is an adaptation of Marek Torčík's autofictional novel "Rozložíš paměť" ("You Will Decompose Memory"), awarded the Magnesia Litera 2024 prize for prose. It opens the theme of growing up against the backdrop of social inequality, latent racism, and homophobia — memory is fragile and unreliable, but some moments remain forever etched.

Director Ondřej Štefaňák and author Marek Torčík share a similar life story: both grew up in small Moravian towns and both moved to Prague. The production is thus not just an intimate probe into one memory, but a statement about the search for identity, the courage to tell one's own story, and the fear of returning to places that both create and wound a person.