Dokumentarista – Mahdal Martin (2024)

In your hands, you hold not only the author's biography of the documentary filmmaker, publicist, and writer Martin Mahdal, but also a unique testimony of how documentary films are made (or rather often not made) in the Czech Republic. The author recalls his beginnings as a creator, his collaboration with Czech Television, and the period when he sought his place as a freelancer. He mentions several interesting personalities he had the opportunity to meet, while also addressing some unpleasant matters he encountered during his work. Among these were corruption and especially censorship or a sheer reluctance of official bodies to acknowledge certain events and issues publicly. The documentary filmmaker is another book in Martin Mahdal's series published by Olympia, which is based on his experiences as a documentary filmmaker. It loosely follows the documentary publication The Law of Five Classes (Olympia, 2022) and especially the book The Nineties (Olympia, 2023), in which the author shared his hard-earned experiences from post-revolutionary entrepreneurship as one of the victims of the Berdych gang. Just like with his previous books, his colleague producer Markéta Adamcová assisted him in preparing The Documentary Filmmaker.