About Me
Ing. Pavel Borecký MA.
I was born in the autumn days of 1986 and raised in “the city of 100 towers” called Prague. Later, I was trained as a social anthropologist, documentary filmmaker and development specialist. I am active at the intersection of arts, sciences, sustainability and urban/environmental futures.
In 2012, my friends and I co-founded Anthropictures, our country’s first applied anthropology organization. In Estonia, I helped the student collective Eesti Antropoloogia Ühendus. Moving to Switzerland, I co-curated EthnoKino, an educational film programme in the oldest squat Reitschule.
Finally, for five years I convened the European Applied Anthropology Network and helped to run the ground-breaking Why the World Needs Anthropologists event, which resulted in the namesake book.
My films Solaris (2015) and In the Devil’s Garden (2018) focused on the consumption culture in Estonia and the question of decolonisation in the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Both films were celebrated by the international film and scientific community.
Supported by the Swiss Excellence PhD scholarship, a bunch of talented friends and local communities, we finished my first feature documentary in 2020. Living Water won “Valor da Água” in Portugal and “Spotlight Award” in the Czech Republic, and travelled to well-established film festivals such as Ji.hlava, Visions du Réel, CPH:DOX, Movies that Matter, DokuFest and Seminci.
In 2022, I was honoured to be selected as a Berlinale Talents director.
Nowadays, I am affiliated with the University of Bern (Institute of Social Anthropology + Walter Benjamin Kolleg) where I conduct my PhD studies. Since 2022, I have been working at the Institute of Planning and Development Prague making my hometown more resilient to climate change.
I am a former floorball player, bonsaist-on-vacation and future olive connoisseur.
My Bedouin friends in the south of Jordan call me “Sager” (falcon).
