Work Hard, Fail Hard

An entertaining evening full of failures from which we can (hopefully) learn a lesson, hosted by stand-up comedian Tereza Bonaventurová. Sharing their stories will be: producer Dagmar Sedláčková; producer Jan Kallista; Pantelis Panteloglou, artistic director of the Olympia International Festival for Children and Young People and president of ECFA; Jukka-Pekka Laakso, director of the Tampere Film Festival; producer and creative director Michal Deus; and Krzysztof Sienkiewicz, organiser and curator of the ŻUBROFFKA International Short Film Festival, Krzysztof Sienkiewicz.

How does it happen that something goes wrong? And what if it goes very wrong? And what if we can (perhaps) learn from it? Each speaker has 10 minutes to talk about their failure. These stories of failure are intended to offer encouragement and show that when something goes wrong, it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the world. The evening’s guests – prominent figures from the Czech audiovisual scene – will, with a healthy dose of humour and self-reflection, recount situations and moments when they were on the verge of giving up, but ultimately took lessons from them to apply to their future work and rose from the ashes. We highly recommend this event to everyone in the film industry and the wider public.

Michal Deus

Michal Deus is a producer, entrepreneur and educator whose work spans advertising and audiovisual production. After studying alternative and puppet theatre acting and theatre anthropology at DAMU in Prague, he held leadership positions at advertising agencies including Publicis Prague, LineArt, Dílna and AdHackers. He is now the owner of Circus Deus, a creative holding company whose flagship venture is MovixBox, a Czech platform for vertical mobile series, alongside several other production and creative brands. Together with Jan Dufek and Jiří Mádl, he co-created the experimental series Hotel Kokořín for Televize Seznam. Since 2008, he has taught at DAMU’s Department of Production and lectured at other universities. He also has a longstanding interest in gastronomy, having trained at Le Cordon Bleu in London and published a cookbook in Slovakia in 2014.

Jan Kallista

Jan Kallista graduated in production from FAMU in 2005. He is the founder of the commercial production company AD WOOD and co-founder of the production company FILM KOLEKTIV, established in 2013. Jan specialises primarily in commercial production and international co-productions. In the past, he has been actively involved in various professional organisations, serving as Vice-Chair of the Association of Audiovisual Producers and representing the Czech Republic at CFP-E (European Association of Commercial Producers) The feature-length sci-fi film Restore Point (Bod obnovy, 2023, dir. Robert Hloz), produced by Jan, won four Czech Lion Awards in 2024 and is distributed internationally by sales agent XYZ Films.

Jukka-Pekka Laakso

Jukka-Pekka Laakso is festival director of Tampere Film Festival since 2002.  As a festival director he shares the responsibility to strategic planning and programming with a co-director. He has been a member of more than 70 juries in various film festivals. Jukka also acts as the executive director for  Pirkanmaa Film Centre  in Tampere. The film centre is a non-profit organisation that runs an art-house cinema, distributes films in Finland  and works extensively with media education.

Pantelis Panteloglou

Pantelis Panteloglou was born in Athens in 1976. He studied Social Anthropology at Panteion University, where he also did postgraduate studies. He has worked in the wider cultural and audiovisual field since the beginning of 2000, in various creative, technical and administrative positions. Since the beginning of 2024 he is the artistic director of Olympia International Film Festival for Children and Young People, where he has been working part-time since 2011 and full-time since 2018. As of 2023 he is president of the European Children's Film Association (ECFA) for a five-year term.

Dagmar Sedláčková

Dagmar Sedláčková studied film studies at Charles University and film production at FAMU. She works as a producer and partner at MasterFilm, where she focuses on auteur feature films, documentaries and TV series, as well as international co-productions. The films she has produced or co-produced have been screened at major international festivals, including Cannes, Locarno, the Berlinale and Annecy, and she has also received a nomination for the European Film Awards. For Audionaut, she developed and produced the award-winning true-crime podcast Pohřešovaná. Her latest production is the feature film Caravan by director Zuzana Kirchnerová, which won the Czech Lion for Best Film of 2025. She is also a co-founder of the Girls in Film Prague platform, which connects and supports a new generation of women, non-binary and trans filmmakers, and advocates for their equal representation in the film industry.

Krzysztof Sienkiewicz

Krzysztof Sienkiewicz, based on The north-eastern corner of Poland called PODLASIE/ cultural animator / co-creator of ZUBROFFKA International Short Film Festival and film travelling project  Filmowe Podlasie Atakuje! / Bialostocki Osrodek Kultury and discussion film club GaG activator/ curator and ideas refrigerator / all the time cloud observer!