Karlovy Vary 2025: Action Item | Interview with Paula Ďurinová

Anxiety is a difficult topic to deal with. How does one even show these feelings or the burnout that follows? Slovak filmmaker, visual artist, and writer based in Berlin, Paula Ďurinová, has managed to do just that in her latest experimental documentary Action Item, which premiered in the Proxima Competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) 2025. Last year, her feature debut Lapilli was also screened in the same strand.

This fragile, political, and subversive documentary breaks all images of what and how one can deal with anxiety.

The name itself makes the film stand out. “I borrowed the title Action Item from corporate lingo,” says Paula with a knowing smile. “It’s usually a term for a task that needs resolving to move forward, so I liked reclaiming that language to reflect the emotional and existential tasks we carry. It’s a film about processing burnout, about naming the unnamed.”

The opening shot of the film shows a woman cycling her way through Berlin, joining in group conversations, giving us an insight into the invisible, gentle healing that arises—captivating the audience to follow the story further.

The film follows a woman navigating the aftermath of burnout, but its real subject is less a singular character than the systems, silences, and internal negotiations that have accumulated under capitalism. There is a moment to pause, look around, and bring this problem to the fore.

“I felt completely detached from myself,” she recalls. “It wasn’t a corporate burnout, but something more pervasive, a kind of systemic exhaustion.” The story thus grows from her own personal experience of living in Berlin, exhausted, working multiple jobs and trying to learn a new language. That detachment became her cinematic entry point.

She submerged herself in self-published zines, critical essays, and consciousness-raising collectives that interrogated mental health through a political lens. “I became deeply interested in how anxiety is privatized,” she explains. “We’re made to feel like it’s a personal failing. But often, it’s a response to something structural. I wanted the film to trace that shift from the individual to the collective.”

This film does not offer a solution nor a resolution, but instead gives you the space to think about it. “We’re trained to think in binaries: good vs. bad, healed vs. broken, but so much of life happens in the in-between. I wanted to explore that grey space, where you’re not okay but not collapsing either.”

Her visual treatment of the film—slow and circular—tries to show us the cycle of recurring anxiety, where the director indeed admits that she draws inspiration from a panic attack: the buildup and the slow ebbing in its aftermath. “There’s a strange dramaturgy to it,” she added, “and I was curious if that could be translated into film language.”

So, the film has more long shots, reflective silences woven with fragments of conversations, and the overall effect is lingering, kind of therapeutic.

The film revolves around Eliana, Paula’s friend who she met at one of the group meetings. “One evening she shared her burnout story with me,” said Paula. “It was almost identical to mine. There was this strange moment of relief, this excitement of recognition. That was the spark.”

Though the filming began during the COVID-19 pandemic, which paradoxically amplified both the urgency and the universality of the film’s themes, midway through, she had to pause the project to grieve the loss of her grandparents—an experience that became the basis of her debut film (which also premiered at Proxima the previous year). “The two films began bleeding into each other,” she says. “I needed space to process grief separately.”

Even as she resumed Action Item, Paula stressed she was not looking at closure. “This wasn’t a recovery story. It was about listening. The act of listening itself can be cinematic.”

When asked what she hopes audiences take away from the film, Paula hesitates. “I don’t want the film to preach,” she says. “There’s no one way to deal with anxiety. Some people’s depression stems from trauma, others from economic insecurity. I can’t speak for everyone.” But she hopes the film will open a quiet space. “A space where people feel seen. Where they might find words for what they’re feeling. Or simply realize they’re not alone.”

For Paula, it’s documentary that she loves more than fiction. “I love the documentary’s hybrid nature, its fluidity. You can work with fragments, with poetic structures, even with fictionalized scenes. That’s the space I’m interested in staying in. I come more from visual arts than classic documentary training,” she says. “There’s a whole group of us working in this essayistic, experimental space. There may not be a genre name for it, but it’s a kind of kinship. That’s what I’m grateful for.”

With two emotionally raw films completed within a short span, Paula is ready for a break. “There’s a very loose idea brewing,” she says, “but I don’t want to rush it. I want it to grow slowly.”

We are thrilled to be reporting directly from the Czech Republic at the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.