Unpack Your 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 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 behind forever. You have no choice. Perhaps you will discover that nothing matters, that you can simply overcome your memories. Can you ever escape the places that shaped you?

The production is an adaptation of Marek Torčík's autofictional novel "Unpack Your Memory", which won the Magnesia Litera 2024 award for prose. It opens the theme of coming-of-age against the backdrop of social inequality, latent racism, and homophobia.

Director Ondřej Štefaňák and author Marek Torčík both grew up in small Moravian towns and both moved to Prague. The production is thus an intimate probe into one person's memory and 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 a person.