My Father, the Prince + Q&A with Lila Schwarzenberg

An intimate portrait of the relationship between Karel Schwarzenberg, Chancellor to Václav Havel, a key figure of post-November 1989 Czech politics and the head of one of the oldest and richest noble families, and his daughter Lila Schwarzenberg.

The filmmaker, who admits being afraid of her reticent and overpowering father when younger, uses a camera to facilitate a difficult and a long overdue father-daughter conversation daringly probing into their shared past and complicated relationship. Her story of a girl, who resists  convention and aristocratic protocols  while growing up in a family tradition dominated by men and hereditary princes, is woven into the story of her famous, charismatic father whose childhood was marked by dispossession and expulsion, and who despite all odds became a statesman, head of Schwarzenberg family and revolutionary. Filmed over the course of five years in family residencies in Prague and Vienna, and Orlik and Murau castles, the originally envisaged  documentary about Karel Schwarzenberg becomes  a highly intimate portrait of two people who are both familiar and yet strangers trying to find a way to each other against the backdrop of a turbulent family history marked by turns of fate. 

Lukas Sturm, Lila Schwarzenberg, Austria/Czech Republic, 2022, 79’, in German with English subtitles