Better Go Mad in the Wild: Miro Remo’s Crystal Globe Triumph

At this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival one film stood apart from the rest. Miro Remo’s Better Go Mad in the Wild not only won the prestigious Crystal Globe for Best Picture, it also left audiences with a story that lingers long after the credits roll.

Miro Remo With His Crystal Globe

The film follows real-life twins Franta and Ondra, who live a primitive, almost timeless existence on a mountain farm. Through their labor, poetry, and music, Remo captures a relationship that is at once tender, chaotic, and profoundly human. It’s a portrait of brotherhood that oscillates between joy and sorrow, and it is unlike anything else in contemporary cinema.

Remo first discovered the twins through writer Aleš Palán’s book, which painted their lifestyle in a somewhat romantic light. While Palán spent only a few days with the brothers, Remo immersed himself for months. “It was necessary to have this huge, this big friendship between me and the twins,” he explained. “In a documentary, there is no other way to do it.” That intimacy allowed the camera to witness the subtleties of their connection the laughter, the arguments, and the quiet reconciliations.

The result is both magical and deeply real. The twins’ art becomes a central thread. Franta’s poetry, full of raw emotion, reveals the blues of a man longing for connection, while Ondra provides a grounding counterpoint. Their voices, sometimes raised in song, sometimes muttering through smoke shared via a hole in a wall, become a chorus of resilience.

Remo also introduced a striking visual device, a large mirror that became both prop and metaphor. “It was like a tool of beauty and truth,” he said, describing it as part confessional for the brothers allowing for moments of deep self reflection. The mirror transforms simple observation into something mythic, allowing the twins to confront themselves and each other in ways words alone could not.

Franta, Ondra and Miro

Tragically, the film’s triumph was overshadowed by the news that Franta passed away the day after the award ceremony. That loss imbues the work with even more weight. What was already a moving exploration of life and kinship now stands as a memorial to a man whose art and humanity were so vividly preserved on screen.

In the end, Better Go Mad in the Wild resists easy categorization. Documentary, drama, folk poetry on film, it is all of these and more. Above all, it is storytelling in its purest form. It provides a reminder that cinema doesn’t just show us lives, it intertwines them with our own.

🎧 To hear the full conversation with Miro Remo, including behind-the-scenes insights into the making of Better Go Mad in the Wild, listen to the complete interview here on Stream Close Up or wherever you find your podcasts