EXCLUSIVE: Grasshopper Film has acquired U.S. rights to I’m Not Everything I Want To Be, the award-winning documentary about Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková that’s contending for Oscars in multiple categories.
Klára Tasovská’s film won two awards at the Czech Lions (the Czech Republic’s equivalent of the Academy Awards), including Best Documentary and Best Editing. It also won major prizes at the Torino Film Festival in Italy and the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montréal, among other awards. The film is made entirely from photographs by Jarcovjáková, an extraordinary artist who began her career in Czechoslovakia’s Communist era, often focusing on minorities and marginalized group’s including the LGBTQ community.
We have your first look at the film in the trailer above.
Grasshopper Film
“Through a dynamic montage of still images, layered sound design, contemporary music and Jarcovjáková’s own voice drawn from her diaries, the film delivers a wild, intimate, and deeply political cinematic experience,” said Ryan Krivoshey of Grasshopper Film. “We’re thrilled to share it with audiences.”
The film chronicles the photographer’s “turbulent, decades-long journey,” notes a release, “as she documents her search for self-acceptance and freedom in Czechoslovakia.”
“Libuše Jarcovjáková’s work has influenced generations of artists in the Czech Republic – to have the opportunity to bring her work to American audiences is sensational,” commented the director. “We are delighted to partner with Grasshopper.”
I’m Not Everything I Want To Be has been selected by the Czech Republic as its official entry for the Oscar category of Best International Film. Grasshopper Film, which is also submitting the documentary for Best Documentary Feature, will release the film theatrically in New York and Los Angeles next month.
Grasshopper Film
The acquisition deal was negotiated by Grasshopper’s Krivoshey, with Wouter Jansen of Square Eyes, which is handling international sales. The documentary has been sold to numerous territories, including Germany and Switzerland (Salzgeber), Austria (Polyfilm), France (Centre audiovisual Simone de Beauvoir), Portugal (No Comboio), Spain (Filmin), Brazil (Filmicca), and India (Big Tree Entertainment).
“I am a photographer and a teacher of photography,” Jarcovjáková writes on her website. “As I pass through various landscapes, wondrous strange images emerge. What is strange is interesting, but what is most strange is most interesting. I have indulged in out-of-the-ordinary life experiences. I have become a part of different social groups – probably because of my empathy – which is an important part of my personality and gives me an endless source of visual stories to tell.”
Grasshopper Film, founded in 2015, is a distribution company “dedicated to the release of acclaimed and award-winning independent cinema.” Recent titles include Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude, Jem Cohen’s Little, Big, And Far, and Roberto Minervini’s The Damned. It released the 2023 award-winning documentary Pictures of Ghosts, directed by Kleber Mendonca Filho, who is in Oscar contention this year for the drama The Secret Agent.
Watch the trailer for I’m Not Everything I Want To Be above.
