You Will Unpack Memory

Raw coming of age 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 mother's silence, the authority of grandparents. A dawning 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 into the big city, but the past does not let you go. Returning terrifies you. Your grandfather's death forces you back to places you wanted to leave behind forever. You have no choice. Perhaps you will discover that nothing matters, that you can simply overcome your memories. Can you ever truly escape the places that shaped you?

The production is an adaptation of Marek Torčík's autofictional novel "You Will Unpack Memory", which won the Magnesia Litera 2024 award for prose. It opens up the theme of coming of age against a 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 merely an intimate probe into one person's memory, but a testimony to the search for identity, the courage to tell one's own story, and the fear of returning to places that both create and wound us.