Maja Pencic Explores Pathos and Dreams on the Streets of Prague in Documentary ‘Minimum Love’

When Maja Pencic first set out to hit the streets with her camera as a Prague film student, she was determined to document the reality she found by asking direct questions.

That approach to documentary filmmaking in the Czech Republic, where it’s standard practice to employ a dramaturg and to create scenes to heighten tension or irony, is somewhat revolutionary these days.

But, says Pencic, she instinctively felt that for her feature debut, querying the thoughts of people all around you on camera was the only way to go.

So she and a colleague confronted crowds leaving a metro station, trying desperately to get them to share about how their day was going.

“I needed to stop being afraid to walk around with a camera,” Pencic says. “And I was curious about what was going on in the crowds of people around me, for example on the tram.”

Thus,…