I’m Not Everything I Want to Be

The New York Times dubbed photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková “the Nan Goldin of Soviet Prague”. She has been working since the 1960s, shooting gritty and visceral images of marginalized groups, and often turning the camera on herself. But it wasn’t until recently that the artistic merit of her photographs was recognized internationally. When she’s invited to show her work at the 2019 Les Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, she dives into her archive.

This film about Jarcovjáková’s life and work draws exclusively on her own material, and takes the form of a slideshow with additional journal extracts read aloud by the photographer. The rhythmic succession of thousands of photographs draws the viewer into the world as she experienced it in her decades-long search for freedom.

Powerful use of audio transports us through her turbulent past, with appropriate background sounds bringing the images to life—machine noise for her pictures of workers in Communist Prague, bass rhythms for her scenes from Berlin nightlife, and camera clicks for the models she photographed for leading fashion magazines in Tokyo.