Jarek

The film about Jaromír Nohavic is a biographical documentary, but it is definitely not boring or descriptive. Jaromír – Jarek Nohavica is a popular and successful Czech singer-songwriter with songs that we all know. Much has been written and said about him. However, this is only a fragment of the overall picture of this distinctive and ambiguous personality. So what kind of person is this famous, adored and condemned singer-songwriter actually? His life and image would have been different if he had not accepted the Pushkin Prize (for translations of songs by Vysotsky and Okudzhava) from President Putin. The man who unleashed the war in Ukraine and is labeled a war criminal. This fact puts Nohavica in a bad light, even though in the first decade of his professional career, in the harsh normalization times, he was a fighter with the regime and received several bans for what he sang and said at his concerts. Jaromír Nohavica has been writing songs for over 40 years. How the world around him is changing is reflected in the themes he covers and in the atmosphere of his concerts, which are always sold out. Because everyone will find something for themselves at his concert. It will please one, make another laugh, and make another cry. However, he does not always perform only as a soloist. He collaborates with various musical ensembles, for example with the Čechomor or the Janáček Philharmonic. He has over 500 of his own songs, many poems, and at least 120 lyrics and translations of songs for other performers. The ones he wrote for Maria Rottrová are well-known, but it is less known that he also wrote for Petr Janda and the band Citrón. Nohavica is also the most translated Czech songwriter. His songs are sung in Polish, English, German, Russian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Hungarian, Spanish, and Italian. In short: Jaromír Nohavica is a Renaissance man - a talented, prolific, versatile, distinctive, intelligent, well-read and diligent author and performer. He calls himself by the Native American name "He who composes and sings songs," but he can and does much more. The documentary could easily be called "500 Shades of Jaromír Nohavica," because his personality has as many shades as he imprinted in his songs.