A grandfather who is a feminist, an adopted young boy who astounds with his intellect, and Freshta who will do anything to run away from her abusive husband. Like the other women in the family, Herra wears a burka and hides in a closet when guests arrive. Soon she starts a new job with American woman, Heidi, who has little understanding of the way women live in Afghanistan, and even less that not everybody wants to be saved by Westerners.
The film is based on the novel Freshta by Petra Procházková, an extraordinary and deeply humanistic book in which the author, thanks to her own personal experience, has managed to capture with an exceptional empathy the efforts of Afghan women to emancipate in the post-Taliban era.
The medium of animation for this project seemed natural to me. I have been working on an art design and style of animation which bring the characters and their environment closer to the audience and help them accept the characters and live their lives with them. Animation also enables to capture deep emotions and the bitter humour of this story. Animation also makes the story more lucid and simple. At the same time, stylized visuals, the possibility of compression, the elimination of the insignificant make the film more compact and strengthen the most important situations.
- Michaela Pavlátová
The main strength of the story lays on gentle humor and well observed everyday details of the family life. My Sunny Maad is a universal tale of husbands and wives, lovers and friends, who all seek happiness and acceptance against the backdrop of the unexpected events playing around them. It is a story about conceptions of human faith in a war-stricken country, seen through the eyes of the main heroine, Herra, a Czech woman.
- Michaela Pavlátová