'Up Again' Director Filmed a Teen Champion's Rise from the Ice Itself

The world premiere of "Up Again," a three-year chronicle of Czech teenage figure skating champion Barbora Vrankova, is screening at the Ji.hlava documentary festival. Director Eliska Cilkova Andrsova opens the film in darkness, with nothing but the sound of blades scraping ice at high speed.

She returns to that motif throughout, she says, because wherever Vrankova goes, "mentally, she is still on the ice."

Andrsova is a former competitive skater herself. She cut the film and composed its score. She first encountered Vrankova on the ice, and her insider knowledge shaped the whole project.

"Thanks to my own experience on the ice," she says, "I understand the scoring system and the technical language of figure skating. This shared understanding made it easy for me to connect with Barbora, who was the reigning Czech national champion at the time."

Audiences first meet Vrankova at 15. Over the following years she trains at a prestigious skating school in Egna, Italy, and later in the United States, while pressure mounts on her and her family. "A triple jump on ice skates lasts just a few seconds but requires years of physical training and mental isolation," the director says. With no time for regular school, Vrankova's days consist of online lessons, physiotherapy and a strict training regimen.

What does the filming demand?

The technical obstacles were considerable. "Imagine 20 figure skaters jumping simultaneously, loud pop music playing almost constantly, and coaches shouting across the ice rink," Andrsova says. "And of course, you cannot expect someone performing triple jumps to wear a microphone!"

Some sequences were filmed "literally from the ice, skating alongside Barbora with our cameras." Her skating background let her guide the cinematographers. "I didn't want to create a conventional sports documentary with the visual language of television coverage," she explains. "I wanted the audience to experience the physical reality of skating from very close."

Access was itself a hurdle. The world of elite figure skating, she notes, is "surprisingly closed to outsiders" — at the Egna training center, even parents were sometimes barred from watching sessions. The film covers Vrankova growing from 15 to 18 years old, which required a careful balance: "being close enough to capture intimate moments and remaining as unobtrusive as possible."

Trust was tested when Andrsova asked her team to stop filming after Vrankova struggled with several falls. "Later, Barbora herself told me that falling was simply part of figure skating, and that next time we should film everything," the director recalls. "It showed how much trust had developed between us."

How does sound carry the story?

Sound is central rather than decorative. It is, Andrsova says, "a path to the themes the film explores: performance, expectations and the search for one's own place in a world that constantly judges people by their results."

Her previous documentary, "Pripyat Piano," was also built on sound, exploring the aural remains of pianos in homes abandoned inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone after the 1986 nuclear disaster.

For "Up Again," she says, "I built a subtle second layer of storytelling through sound, reflecting Barbora's inner world." The images stayed purely observational, filmed from Vrankova's perspective, while the sound allowed "a little more creative freedom."

The production's biggest surprise reshaped the film entirely: Vrankova's withdrawal from the European Championships. "For a competitive figure skater, the European Championships represent an enormous dream," Andrsova says. "And suddenly, Barbora was not going. I really hadn't expected that."

That moment, she says, marked the point when the film "was becoming something much more complex" — and it raised the question that became its center: "Who are we when we are no longer defined by our achievements?"

Screening in the Czech Joy competition section, "Up Again" arrives as both a sports chronicle and a study of identity under pressure, told from inside the rink.