Not only people, but also cities, streets and houses know how to resist fate. Through half-open doors, they allow us to see the deviations from norms and conventions that turn destruction and death into poetry and hope. A red carriage hidden under a courtyard balcony, a statue of a bull proudly bowing its head for the last fight with the excavator-toreadors, or the TV tower rising like a space rocket that will one day take us to another, supposedly better earth. A series of motifs that, over the course of two decades of Žižkov’s redevelopment, were captured by a tireless photographer.

In the first half of the 1980s, graphic designer Petr Toman took hundreds of slides of the so-called Žižkov redevelopment. His approach had no artistic ambitions; he did not aestheticize, he did not look for metaphors, but nostalgically recorded the disappearing city he had known since childhood. The photographs were discovered in his private archive by filmmaker Radim Procházka, who together with editor Jan Daňhel and composer Michal Rataje created an experimental site-specific film for a widescreen projection format at the Centre for Architecture and Metropolitan Planning in 2021.