News server Lidovky.cz reports that Czech Television and its inspection board
have closed their discussion of the depiction of minorities in the serial
"Ambulance 2" (Sanitka 2). Czech TV claims that all of the situations filmed for
the serial are in order because they are based on the actual experiences of
ambulance workers and contemporary reality.
The serial began broadcasting last fall. Written by Ivan Hubač and directed
by Filip Renč, it got good ratings as well as many critical reactions over its
scenes depicting minorities or members of other nationalities.
Two viewers in particular contacted the Board of Czech Television over the
serial. "… your portrayal is… all the more unbelievable, unenlightened and
also (and I consider this to be the biggest problem) angry, jaundiced, full of
fear of [the Roma,] who give the impression of being a bloodthirsty, weird, wild
minority. If they do have a sense of justice, then it is a bloody justice,
performed in a barbaric way," documentary filmmaker Lukáš Senft complained in an
open letter to the director last year.
“I am unable to grasp why filmmakers are creating media images that represent
the Romani minority – even at the cost of outright falsification – as a
dangerous, foreign, and incomprehensible group of people. These images are
comprised of generalizations, of invented peculiarities, and of prejudices that
in the best-case scenario warn the viewer away from us Roma, shutting us behind
a curtain of terrifying rumors and tales,” Senft’s open letter stated.
According to a statement which the daily Lidové noviny has seen, neither the
creators of the serial nor the station will admit to having made any mistakes.
Jan Maxa, Director of Program Development at Czech Television, writes in the
statement that “Sanitka 2” is a successful serial.
“The plot line is based on contemporary reality. The creators consult the
subject-matter in detail with people from the emergency services,” Maxa claims.
“We find negative features in all of the characters in the serial,
irrespective of their skin color. Plot development is not journalism, it works
with a certain degree of invention,” Maxa says with respect to how the
Hubač-Renč duo has depicted Romani characters.
The Board of Czech Television is completely satisfied with such an
explanation and has closed the case. However, Milan Uhde, the chair of the
board, is not afraid to call “Sanitka 2” bad television.
He is not alone. Kateřina Kalistová, the past chair of the Czech Council on
Radio and Television Broadcasting (Rada pro rozhlasové a televizní vysílání),
who is currently the First Deputy Minister of Culture, has a big problem with
the serial.
“Those worst, prejudicial stereotypes that are just washing over the viewers
bother me tremendously. However, from a legal point of view we were unable to
intervene. It’s a matter for the Board of Czech Television, and we handed it
over to them,” Kalistová told Radio Wave at the start of February.
The costly serial also won the “Golden Lemon” (Zlatý citron) anti-prize,
which was given by a jury of the Czech Film and Television Union (FITES) during
its annual Trilobite awards. The jury, comprised of critics and producers, said
the serial is “a symbol of the professional decline of a significant portion of
the original dramatic productions of public broadcast television.”
The awarding of the anti-prize was also controversial. Actor and director
Ondřej Kepka has backed the producers of the serial, while the chair of FITES,
Olga Sommerová, also distanced herself from the anti-prize. Some jurors confirmed to news server iDNES.cz that three of the seven members of
the jury did not vote to award the anti-prize to “Sanitka 2”. Vladimír Just,
chair of the jury, contradicted that claim, telling iDNES.cz that “The vote was
ultimately unanimous – there was just a dispute over whether to include just
Sanitka or other dramatic creations as well. A compromise formulation was the
result.”
