“We have to choose democracy everyday and fight for it” Perla (2025) director Alexandra Makarová

Tereza Holková och Lo Reyman från Ung Media fick chansen att intervjua  slovakisk-österrikiska filmregissören och manusförfattaren Alexandra Makárová  om hennes nya film Perla (2025) under premiären på Stockholms internationella filmfestival. Filmen är ett historiskt drama om konstnären Perla, som flytt från kommunistiska Tjeckoslovakien och försöker bygga ett nytt liv i 1980-talets Wien med sin dotter och nya partner. Men livet är aldrig det man tror och och livet i hemlandet med dess sovjetiska övervakning och angiverikulturer blir plötsligt påtagligt igen.

How has Stockholm been?

– Great. I always wanted to come to Stockholm. I think this is one of the best possibilities as a filmmaker that you can travel to a city with a purpose. It’s been so beautiful and the festival is great. The people are great, so I love it.  I would love to return for a longer time. 

Very glad you like it. What was the first film that made a strong impression on you? 

– For me, it was Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) by Francis Ford Coppola, which I saw when I was too little. I was 7 or 8. I saw it in Slovakia as a child, and even though I couldn’t really understand what it’s really about, I remember loving the characters and the costumes and I remember that it was on a VHS cassette. And after the credits, there was the making off on it. So after watching it many times I understood how many people are behind a film and that there is someone behind the camera because of course as a child when you watch a film, you mainly see the actors. That was the first film that made an impact for me. 

Could you tell us about what sparked the idea for this film, how did it come about?

– It’s a very personal reason because Perla is about the relationship between a very strong minded mother – a young mother, an artist, a woman who really loves to to live and to live to the fullest. With a daughter who can’t understand that because as a child, you just want to be loved wholeheartedly by your mother who’s the most important person to most of us in that age. 

My mother was very similar to Perla, also a painter, and I was also her only child. She was a single mother. She was very young when she got me at 18.
I had a complicated childhood. I wanted to gain a better understanding of why she behaved like she behaved and that’s what started the idea for Perla. Also the political situation, because I was born into Czechoslovakia, which was communist until 1989 and was occupied by the Soviets in 1968, and this, of course, has an impact on every single family in Czechoslovakia and on the decisions they made. So this was very interesting to me to tell, to talk about this time because it’s also coming back, you know. 

Yes definitely. I’m actually from the Czech Republic. 

– Ah, dobrý deň. 

Dobrý den! In that way I could definitely relate, I can see how that experience still lives in my family. 

– Yes. That’s what is so interesting about Europe. Because you have, and every family, whether we’re talking about Eastern Europe or middle Europe, every family has a political experience like this. That happened to them, which still has an effect for many, many, many generations. And I think that’s so important that we understand that the past is the present and that at the end of the day we have to choose democracy everyday and to fight for it and to ask questions.

Speaking of art and occupation, Perla is a depiction of creating art under occupation – both through the main character but also yourself –  even when the occupation is no longer there it still lives inside you. How has the presence of transgenerational trauma shaped the way you create art? 

– A lot, I think. I think more than I have known. And during the whole process of making this film I realized that there is transgenerational trauma within me. I knew of it but I didn’t know that it’s a real thing. And it makes so much sense. So, of course, I’m influenced by it because when I was growing up with my grandparents, because as I said, my mother was very young and she went to Bratislava to study art and I stayed in Košice. 

I grew up with the older generation who survived the 2nd World War, who survived 1968 in Czechoslovakia. We talked about it all the time. Which is great because I know so many families in Austria, for example, or in Germany they don’t talk about what happened during the 3rd Reich, during the Nazi era. They are not telling the stories. So I think now in Germany and in Austria the children start to ask their parents, okay what did your father do? What did his father do? In my family, it was the opposite. They were just talking non stop about it. That affects me a lot in also choosing the stories I want to tell. 

In researching for the film, was there something that surprised you? 

– What surprised me the most is that most of the people in Austria had no idea about the life in their neighboring country. The border, Austria to Czechoslovakia is 56 kilometers. They are the nearest capitals in the whole world, Bratislava and Vienna. But the people in Austria, even my generation, had no idea. I was really shocked. Because everything is connected. Our politics in Europe today is so connected to what happened during and after the 2nd World War.  So I think to understand what ’s going on now, we have to know the history. That was shocking. And how many countries want to get away from the past, but it still shapes our presence. 

Absolutely. Was there a moment in the film that stuck out as particularly difficult or fun to film?

– I have both. Or maybe more beautiful than fun, but when we were filming in Slovakia, we had the most extras. And to actually see that scene where Perla goes by a shop and there’s a queue, people waiting to buy something. Which was everyday life in every communist country because there was not enough food. And I saw it and I felt such a connection to my family. Because it was so well made, the costumes, the extras, the whole set design. This is how my grandmother was standing in the queue. It felt like a time machine. For me this was a big gift that I can do such a film. 

The hardest thing was… In the film, there is a scene which shows how Perla is being arrested in the woods and how soldiers rape her, even if it’s off camera. It was just voices during shooting. But the original take was about 7 minutes and we did it 8 times, I think, and this was really, it was difficult for everyone. That was hard, but necessary. 

I can imagine. And on the topic of that. When writing female characters, telling stories from their perspective, how do you approach the portrayal of violence that is being committed to them? Or specifically how do you approach a scene such as the rape scene?

– Particular this rape scene…I was thinking about it a lot during the script process. I know so many films where there are rape scenes. So personally I didn’t want to show her face and portray it as excitement. But I knew that it’s important to keep the scene. So that the audience can understand her life story better. 

During the editing process we tried to take the scene out, or place it in different places in the film. In the beginning, the film started with the rape scene but we realized during the editing process, if you put it in the beginning, Perla will be a victim from minute one. And I never wanted that. You also always have these types of scenes told from the male gaze, at least what I remember. So I really wanted to not show it explicitly. That’s why I decided to make a one shot so that it’s more observational. Like a camera which is put somewhere like….um…

Like surveillance?

– Yes. Like a surveillance camera. 

Yes. It’s really interesting that you had different placements for that scene in the film. 

– It was really crazy how it changed everything. Put it in the beginning. She’s a victim. The whole narrative changes. When we are talking about shame, in that way it changes sides, you know? And even if we know it’s not her fault, we will perceive her differently. 

In the early stages was there ever an option to tell the story from another perspective other than Perlas?

– She was always the main character, but Julia, her daughter, was also the main character. So when I started, I unconsciously put Julia as the main character too. I then realized I have to choose. It has changed a lot through the years. In the first year when I was writing it, my script advisor told me, okay, so who’s it going to be? You have to focus on one person. And it’s Perla’s story, of course, with the family, but I think I really tried to be respectful with all of the characters. Because for me, there is no villain in this story. It’s the system, but it was important that all of them are ambivalent and also that the daughter is not the child, you know? I hate that when you have the child in the film, because when we think about ourselves when we were 9 or 10 years old, we already were like adults in a way. I didn’t want to have this pattern of this is the child. She had to be her own person.

This is your second feature after Crush My Heart (2018). How was it working on Perla compared to the first one? 

– Like night and day. Really. I don’t use this word very frequently, but I think I was really traumatized by my first feature because it was very low budget. And I was very eager to do it and I was not very patient. It was with non-actors from from the Romani slums in Slovakia, and I found my second main actor and I knew they will grow up and I will lose them, because she was 14 and I met her again at 15 and she was already becoming a woman and so I knew – we have to do it now. So that was my decision and that led to a very hard shooting and also with the distribution…it was hard. It is still a very interesting film, but I have not made my peace with it until now. 

And Perla, it was the opposite. I knew I learned from the first one that I have to be patient. And resilient and persistent, but most importantly patient and not force something before it’s really ready. So the preparation and everything was so important to me. 

Both me and Georg Weiss, the cinematographer who was also the cinematographer in the first one, are traumatised so we decided not to make that same mistake twice. He said, you know what? In the end, it’s just a film. It’s not surgery on an open heart. Let’s have a good time as a team. That was our premise, and I think we did a great job with that. We had a great time, and we had a great team. 

That’s a really healthy approach. 

– Yes. Because you always think, it’s about life and death. But it’s not. It’s just to create light in there with them. 

Another scene I was curious about was the Easter scene. Being from the Czech Republic I experienced that tradition growing up too. The act of whipping and dousing of women with water, sometimes perfumed, on Easter Monday in order to give them health and fertility in the coming year. Why did you want to include that experience? 

– I grew up in the second biggest city of Slovakia, where you do this in a less brutal way. You just get a glass of water thrown at you in the morning, or a perfume. My grandfather did the perfume. 

Did they do the whip?  

– Not with me. But other families did. Our village is the last village to the Ukrainian border. It’s the end of the world until today, it’s like really the end of the world. I spent some Easter holidays there. You knew the men would come. You knew who it was, but still it was thrilling in a way, and I remember hearing screams of women from all over the village. Then it went silent and then again, the screams. 

This had a big impact on me. I began to ask myself the question, why is this still a tradition? The scene, however, became a big problem because the fundings in Slovakia, they wanted this scene to be deleted in the script. Because they said, “but what will the world think about us? That we are barbarians?” 

But this is still happening. Maybe not in the city, but if you search it on YouTube you will still find videos from this year. It’s still happening. And what was also interesting is that during previous Q&A women from eastern parts of Europe are really reacting very emotionally to it and defending it.

 Oh, defending it? That’s interesting. 

– All the older generations are defending it and feel offended by it. Because they have positive feelings about it because it’s their childhood memory. But as a child you don’t have the context of what is happening right now. I think it’s almost the same when you as a child see your mother wearing a scarf for example, you want to wear it too. 

Because it has something to do with love and wanting to be loved. But I think deep inside of them, they know it’s not normal, this tradition. 

That’s interesting because I got to experience it as a child as well, not as brutally as portrayed in the film but still I never had a positive connotation to it. 

– Not even with your father? 

No. I never liked it. When we moved to Sweden I tried to always avoid going back home to Czech during the Easter holidays. So it’s really interesting that people do have some positive connotations. 

– Yes. I also have that with my grandfather because when he died I realized that he was the one who did it. I had many women say that it was nice and I wanted to ask them what would happen if nobody came? Because I know that my mother told me that there was one year when nobody came, and she was the only one from her whole class that didn’t get it. What does that do with you? That means “I am ugly, boys don’t want me. I’m not lovable”. So it’s about sexuality at the end of today. All of it. That’s what I mean with that, as a child, you don’t have this context, you just put it in the category of being loved by your family. 

Absolutely. It’s part of the Easter tradition, just like painting eggs. It becomes a part of the holiday in a way because you don’t question it. 

– Exactly. 

I didn’t question it until I moved here. 

– But they get really aggressive about defending it. 

They do, yeah. But I think to them it’s like defending the tradition. And in that way defending the country, it becomes patriotic in a way. But I’m glad you kept the scene. 

– Yes. I fought for it really hard. 

That’s really good. Keep fighting. 

– Absolutely.  

Throughout the film you invite the audience to take part of the story. You don’t overexplain, you make us feel. Creating this catharsis. You ask a lot of questions with the film, that’s then for the audience to answer. Those are my favourite types of films. I was wondering, is that your natural way of storytelling?

– I love dialogues. I mean it depends on which film you watch but, a (Martin) Scorsese film or old French movies where they just talk a lot – it’s great. But to me as a writer and director, what is more interesting is to leave the space between what was said and we haven’t seen and what will happen next. There’s this mysterious space in between what’s not being told. And this concept is really interesting to me. 

And elliptical storytelling is something I really love. We all have watched films or we know films from the last 120 years. And the structure is almost all the same. However, there are films such as Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018) which are a big inspiration for me in storytelling. Because he (​​Pawel Pawlikowski) tells the story of this couple for 25 years but the film is just 80 minutes long and there are these big edits in between the decades and this is so interesting to me because I don’t want to be bored and I think the classical structure now bores me totally. I think leaving things out is more interesting.

 I agree. And for my last question I wanted to ask, what is your advice to young people that want to tell their story on film? 

– To be persistent, to keep believing and to fight – do not give up.  I see it with my colleagues in Austria that – it’s about resilience. And of course, not everyone can afford to be resilient. It’s also an economical question. But I think it’s so important to not give up. It’s so cheesy… 

It is cheesy, but sometimes that is the best advice. 

– Yes. But it’s hard. It’s hard to stay like that, but I think just keep trying like Perla. Straightforward, not looking back. 

And on that note, I think it’s time for us to end the interview. Thank you so much for this lovely conversation. 

– Thank you.