Hanka

30 thousand words, 2016

Eliška and Jana, two 14 year old actresses in Prague, 1984, are working on their first roles. It’s a television series where Eliška plays Hanka, a girl who helps everyone while Jana plays her best friend Anežka. Becoming friends in real life too, they gradually determine that Hanka has fallen in love to Anežka, but that’s not written in the script. This accounts for Eliška’s actions, because without letting the crew know, they start adding this interpretation into the roles.
  Jana knows Eliška has a secret, but she only learns the details when they’re shooting at another location. Eliška takes her to a house where there is a little girl and a mournful elderly couple. Eliška introduces the girl as her sister and explains that the grandparents have no more children and that if they die, Jitka will go to an orphanage.
  On returning to the film crew, Eliška announces that she’s changing her surname. When asked why, she says this is her father’s name. Who is your father? My father is a murderer, she says.
  She explains to Jana that it was an accident, but he is imprisoned for five years.
  Hanka’s father in the series is played by a famous actor, and they get into the habit of calling each other “father” and “daughter” even when the camera is not running. On the last day he is working on the series, he tells Eliška he’d be happy if she’d call him “father” even when not filming together. She realizes now she has got a father – or rather two, because the director of the series, who has to be a bit of a father to all of them, pays a special attention to her, always paying attention to how she feels. A moment later, she receives a note from her grandparents asking for a callback, and then Pavel, Anežka’s love interest in the series, confesses his real life love to her. But she gets her first kiss from another.