New Czech documentary about neo-Nazi who still lives with his mother at age 40 and hates the world

On 13 July a documentary portrait of an authentic Czech neo-Nazi will be screened in cinemas. Vít Klusák, director of "The White World According to Daliborek" (Svět podle Daliborka), presented the film last week during the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival competition.

The filmmakers followed their protagonist over the course of two years. Dalibor K. works as a housepainter, makes amateur horror films, composes hateful songs, and also creates artistic paintings.

At the time of filming he was almost 40, still living with his mother, and hating not just his job, but "gypsies", Jewish people, refugees, "homosexuals", German Chancellor Angela Merkel, spiders and dentists. "This filming of the documentary about the life of an ordinary neo-Nazi began when his mother had met a Slovak man, Vladimír, through Facebook, a man who relishes saying that he would 'turn the gypsies into asphalt'. Their new relationship unleashed, for Dalibor, the determination to also find a serious connection with somebody, and that gives this film about a lonely man its living dynamic," said Klusák.

The seriously absurd, ice-cold tragicomedy familiarizes viewers with the radical world view of such "ordinary, decent people". Just as it seems the film cannot become any more searing in its vision, it reaches its high point in an absolutely uncompromising way.

"He's a nice guy, he just has stupid opinions," Dalibor's mother says at one point of her son. Klusák said the most difficult thing during the filming was to keep a balance between critical detachment and empathy.

"It's hard to say whether that succeeded. I do not identify with Nazi ideology, understandably, but from the beginning I knew I did not want to film an activist condemnation of him, a documentary character assassination of a Nazi," the director said.

"It seemed more valuable to me to attempt to comprehend how a sensitive boy from a small town becomes a neo-Nazi. Why does he proudly declare this about himself?" Klusák asked.

"How is it possible that his loved ones approve of him, with a smile?" the director wondered. The film shows how Dalibor's hateful attitudes are shared by his colleagues, the people he went to school with, his friends and his loved ones.

"Our immodest ambition is, through Dalibor, to look into the hearts and minds of the thousands of people who have subordinated their view of the world to hateful fear of difference. We want to show where the current wave of intolerance and racism is being spawned and born," the director said.

Klusák said the film was made during 45 days. The conclusion to the project involved the filmmakers bringing Dalibor with them to the memorial at Auschwitz to see the horrors of the Holocaust with his own eyes.

A conflict actually happened at the memorial involving a woman who is a Holocaust survivor. "Dalibor had never been outside of Prostějov, he had never even been to Prague, he'd never stood on the Charles Bridge, he'd never walked around Vyšehrad," the director said.

"He says he doesn't need to visit monuments to have his homeland in his heart," Klusák related. "The World According to Daliborek" is a coproduction of the Czech Republic, Denmark, Slovakia and the United Kingdom.

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