A moving train as an endless cycling stream of feeds that we board daily to escape our responsibilities. What gets us trapped in life is most often a refusal to be present. Whether we fight it or run from it, it will return again very soon. It keeps coming back until we accept it and finish it.

Director’s Vision for ‘Traps in My Feed’

The main brief was to create a sense of the everyday – “just being”. I knew I had to approach the story with the same sensitivity that Ondrej approaches music, and respect it as much as possible.
Probably the biggest challenge was to come up with a story that wasn’t emotionally strained, but contained conflict. To give the viewer a reason to watch the film.

A moving train as an endless cycling stream of feeds that we board daily to escape our responsibilities. What gets us trapped in life is most often a refusal to be present. Whether we fight it or run from it, it will return again very soon. It keeps coming back until we accept it and finish it.

I check emails, run to the store, or get stuck on Instagram. There’s always an escape. I’ve gone through this process a few times myself while writing. So the actual process of writing became a key inspiration.

The film chronicles a young woman’s journey from work. The heroine is trying to avoid a phone call she doesn’t feel much like making. The more she tries to escape it, the more the situation haunts her. The way becomes a trap from which there is only one way out.

Sometimes the best way out is to stop and accept things as they are – to simply “just be”.

The idealistic idea that the whole story would take place in one railcar soon proved to be the biggest obstacle. Huge thanks go to the two relentless production soldiers, Vašek Sládek and Tadeáš Trojánek from Creative Embassy. Both of them spent a month and a half just meeting with the transportation company and figuring out the ever-changing logistics of how the story could be filmed in our conditions. Thanks to the never-ending changes and constraints, the story itself, which was originally supposed to take place in the subway, was also modified. We were only allowed into the selected train car for a look around the day before the actual shoot to test if all the ideas really worked. The model of the tram made from yogamat and packets of tissues that I made at home was also helpful.

Testing on my own in trams during regular traffic didn’t exactly have a positive response. Usually some drunken passenger in close proximity loudly threatened me that he didn’t want to be part of the internet.

Anyway, the time spent on the tram was a great study for the visual of the film.

When you stop and stare for a moment, the tram ride is a fountain of stories and a mix of characters you wouldn’t encounter elsewhere. The casting, was really important and thanks to Dos Amigos one of the best I’ve ever seen. The key role was played by the main character Sandra and Viola Cernodinske. Thanks to their great acting, we managed to shoot the whole film during one wild night drive.

The feeling of the everyday, from the brief, we tried to imprint into all parts of the film with the cinematographer Anna Smoroňová. We spent hours looking for colour, textures and the overall aesthetic of the story. The costume designer Tereza Kopecká also had her inalienable participation in this, helping the individual figures to complete their characters.