Not one but four directors are behind First World Problems, including Febiofest’s artistic director Anna Kopecká. It was her idea to make an anthology film of four shorts also involving Jakub Felcman, Jan Hecht and Israeli filmmaker Elad Keidan. “He’s a more well-established director than we are. Last year he shot a seven-minute film. Anna was aware of it and asked him if we could include it as a counterpoint, so that a different kind of poetics, not just a Czech one, would appear in the film,” Jakub Felcman said.
Keidan described his story – about two fishermen catching the same fish – as both an ironic epilogue to the omnibus film and an allegory of the complicated situation in his country. “Sometimes you can change viewers’ perspective better through the use of humour than by shocking them,” he said.
Most anthology films are joined by a location. However, Anna Kopecká elected to employ theme as the connecting factor. “First World Problems is an ironic title, but it also conveys a sense of unease. These problems include having a broken display on your mobile phone or not having a signal. But when the first world is resolving such petty problems, it affects others. And there’s something terrifying about that,” Felcman said of the Centropa section picture.