Venice 2025: Exclusive FATHER Poster Premiere
The Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti competition will host the world premiere of Father, the latest feature from Slovak director Tereza Nvotová.
Co-written with Dušan Budzak, Father is a psychological drama inspired by real events, a story of love, grief, and the irreversible weight of a single forgotten moment. The film’s logline sets the premise:
“A tragic mistake destroys a man’s life, isolating him in guilt and shaking his marriage. Now facing prison, can he find a path to forgiveness? Can love survive what no heart was built to endure?”
Father centers on Michal (Milan Ondrík), a successful businessman whose life is upended in a moment of unconscious neglect in what is called Forgotten Baby Syndromy. What follows is not just a depiction of a tragic accident, but an intimate, harrowing immersion into the psyche of a man stripped of everything he thought he was.
Known for her charged storytelling and formally daring approach, Nvotová constructs the film as an unbroken emotional dive, rejecting conventional narrative structure in favor of long, uninterrupted takes. “I couldn’t imagine telling this story in a conventional episodic structure, it would feel like flipping through a photo album from a funeral,” she explains. “What I aimed for instead was something immersive, experiential, almost like a video game, but grounded in very different circumstances.”
Nvotová’s approach puts the audience directly inside the protagonist’s skin. “I wanted the audience to fully connect with the main character, to live his life without interruption or distance. The long takes give them no choice,” she says. For lead actor Milan Ondrík, the experience was equally transformative. “He told me it was the most difficult role he’s ever played, and I believe him,” Nvotová adds. “In twenty-minute takes, he couldn’t fake it, he had to become it.”
Though the subject matter is emotionally intense, Father defies the expectations of a tragedy. “I realised this isn’t a film about a tragedy. It’s a love story. The kind of love that happens when you lose everything,” says Nvotová. At the core of the film is an attempt to explore not the headline-making moments, but the quiet, intimate ruptures, “the moments in between. The ones when we’re not in control, when no one’s watching, and we’re our real selves.”
Father marks Nvotová’s premiere at Venice following her acclaimed films Filthy and Nightsiren, and confirms her status as one of the most compelling young voices in contemporary Slovak cinema.
