Minimum Love
DUTCH PREMIERE
On the streets of Prague at night, a young filmmaker asks strangers what they fear, desire and believe in, revealing a generation caught between uncertainty, loneliness and a longing for love.
“How are you?” the director asks people leaving a Prague subway station. Brief answers from tired passers-by lead into intimate encounters with Czech youth, filmed from an almost unbearable proximity. Drunken outbursts give way to tender embraces, while harsh words reveal anxieties about an uncertain world and sensitive, wounded souls. They speak about sex, feminism, the war nearby and the climate crisis. Young people emerge from the darkness and return to it. Night is the film’s dominant colour, connecting the sounds of city streets with long, silent images of loneliness: passengers dozing on the last tram, people sleeping in beds and on benches. Across eight scenes, fatigue and exhaustion meet a longing for connection – and for a love that remains absent, is spoken of only shyly and always seems out of reach.
SCREENINGS
Thursday 5 November 18:45
Friday 6 November 21:15
Director Maja Penčič will be present for a Q&A after the screenings
Programme section(s): Docs Open Debates | Through Women’s Lenses
Original title: Minimum lásky | Year: 2025 | Runtime: 75′
Country: Czechia | Language: Czech | Subtitles: English
Director: Maja Penčič | Production: Maja Penčič | Screenplay: Maja Penčič | Cinematography: Ludmila Cimbůrková, Maja Penčič | Editing: Maja Penčič, Sebastián Kučkovský | Sound: Maja Penčič, Pavel Šolín
FESTIVALS & AWARDS (SELECTION)
Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, 2025 – Best Cinematography, World Premiere | Visions du Réel, 2026 – International Premiere | Doc Alliance Awards, 2026 | Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival, 2026
DIRECTOR’S BIO
Maja Penčič was born in Prague in the first year of the new millennium and is currently studying documentary film at FAMU. Her short film Passportless Mess (2022) had its international premiere at Doclisboa, where it received an Honourable Mention from the jury. Her feature debut, Minimum Love (2025), premiered at the Ji.hlava IDFF, where it won the Best Cinematography Award. The film was also selected for Visions du Réel and the Doc Alliance Selection in 2026. For her, documentary film is primarily an artistic form through which she seeks ways to express her thoughts about the foolish world. She likes to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations and is currently working on a film poem about belly buttons.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
This film is me. It is my language, my speech, my expression of the world around me. I said it in seventy-five minutes, but that would be quite a long monologue.
