Slovakia
68′, 2022.
DIRECTED BY
Jaro Vojtek
PRODUCED BY
Ivan Ostrochovský
SCRIPTWRITER
Marek Leščák, Jaro Vojtek
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Tomáš Stanek, Peter Balcár, Norbert Hudec
EDITED BY
Peter Harum, Maroš Šlapeta
The Shift depicts the lives of people who have to travel back home after working hard on their so-called weekly tours – a truck driver, a care-worker in Austria and a group of manual workers. The film reflects their dreams and desires, but also the sacrifices they have to make when their relatives are dependent on their incomes, when they are in foreign cities – in hostels, in the households of other people. What happens to them? What do they dream about? A social probe into the phenomenon of weekly tours, where the time spent away from their homes actually destroys what they are working for: their families and relationships with their loved ones.
Jaro Vojtek graduated from the Film and Television Faculty in Bratislava. His feature-length documentary Here We Are! (2005), about a Slovak family returning to Slovakia from Kazakhstan, premiered at Karlovy Vary. His other films, The Border (2009), and debute feature Children (2014) also received awards and recognition on prestigious festivals.