Tekno Isn’t Everything

What became of the people and places that caught filmmakers’ attention years ago? Eight years on, director Karel Koula returned to a community close to his heart — the tekno ravers. Back then, together with director Radim Špaček, he had filmed an event that in the blink of an eye turned from an alternative gathering of young people into a massacre. It was the notorious CzechTek 2005, and the documentary was called Tekno Is My Everything.

Water cannon, truncheons, tear gas and dozens of injured marked CzechTek in that fateful year of 2005, and a year later an event of the same name took place once more. Since then the ravers seem to have vanished from the media. What are they doing today? Back then they wanted to be independent of the system. Did they manage it? Among other places, Karel Koula takes us to a scrapyard of old raver vehicles. Is it also a scrapyard of discarded raver ideals?

We return to the story of a man with a history of drug use and a suicide attempt behind him. Has he found meaning in what he does? Where does he look for freedom without drugs? And what about the musician who after a while began to feel that the raver life no longer appealed to him — did that era enrich him in some way? We find the third hero at work in the café of the National Gallery. Does his former lifestyle still inspire him in any way? The fourth is a woman who, musically, is still drawn to the elements of ecstasy that techno once stirred in her — though today this has more to do with her field of study.

In a visually many-layered film, director Karel Koula captures the shift in the values and direction of people who not so long ago started out as ravers.