CPH:DOX 2024 – I’m Not Everything I Want to Be / Ještě nejsem, kým chci být

Czechoslovakia, 1968. Libuše Jarcovjáková is 16 years old. She has short, messy hair and a black and white camera. The Soviet regime enters a repressive phase of ‘normalisation’ after the mass protests of the Prague Spring, and under the pretext that she is not working class enough, they keep rejecting her applications to art school. She befriends workers from a printing factory, outcasts from the Roma community, Vietnamese migrant workers, gays and pariahs from the T-Club – a queer underground bar in Prague that soon becomes her new home. She is rarely sober and struggles to understand who she is. And then she documents it all by taking photos and notes in her diaries, from Czechoslovakia to Berlin to Tokyo. Made up entirely of Libuše’s stills and notes, ‘I’m Not Everything I Want to Be’ tells a marvellous story about artmaking as a free space.