Ondřej Provazník on Broken Voices

Can Fiction Heal?

Broken Voices raises tough questions about art, memory, and responsibility.

At this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Ondřej Provazník premiered Broken Voices (Sbormistr), a drama about two sisters in a girls’ choir navigating rivalry, loyalty, and the pressures of a domineering choirmaster. Inspired by the 2004 Bambini di Praga scandal, the film touches on abuse of power in a highly competitive artistic environment.

Provazník traces the origin of the film back to an unexpected encounter. “One night in a bar, I saw some young women singing into a mobile phone in perfect polyphony,” he recalled. “Then I realized they were former choir girls. At the same time their choirmaster was facing criminal charges, and yet some still admired him. That ambiguity really stopped me”.

Ondřej Provazník

This ambiguity, he explained, became the starting point for a fiction film. “The two main girls are completely fictitious,” he said. “I did interviews with former choir members and took some details from that, but I didn’t want to make the real criminal case. I wanted to understand how it was possible that so many girls stayed loyal”.

The line between inspiration and representation has become a matter of public debate. Radovan Síbrt, whose sister sang in the Bambini di Praga, has argued that the film too closely resembles her experiences. He has said she did not consent to her story being used, and that certain details including character names risk retraumatizing her.

Provazník, however, insists that his goal was to avoid specific portrayals. “I tried to make the story as general as possible, with no real names, not to touch any victim,” he explained. “But of course, that was the difficult part of the job”.

His choice of narrative structure was also designed to shift the focus. “Usually those films show the trauma early and then follow the healing,” he noted. “I wanted to show what happened before and how tricky the environment is, how complicated the relationships are”.

Working with teenage actresses added another layer of responsibility. “We did everything for the safety of the girls,” Provazník said. “An intimacy coordinator, a psychologist, and constant conversations with the parents. Of course, we couldn’t risk traumatizing our actresses with a film about trauma”. 

That decision paid off. Kateřina Falbrová, who plays one of the sisters, was honored at Karlovy Vary with the Special Jury award, recognition of both her talent and the film’s sensitive handling of such demanding material.

Kateřina Falbrová

The controversy illustrates the tension between artistic interpretation and lived experience. On one side are concerns that fictionalized retellings may reopen old wounds or blur consent. On the other is Provazník’s defense of his method: a fictional narrative designed to explore why abuse can remain hidden, and why it can take years before victims feel able to speak. “Anyone who sees the film will understand there’s no scandalous attitude to the story,” he said.

Broken Voices may not provide neat answers. Instead, it lingers in the uncertainty between admiration and betrayal, silence and disclosure. That space, troubling, ambiguous, unresolved is both the film’s subject and the source of its fiercest debates.

👉 Hear more from Ondřej Provazník on Stream Close Up.