Copying videos illegally on a mass scale is one thing, but making a marketable product out of them is quite another. Just think of the most basic problem: language – your average customer won’t be a polyglot! The answer to that problem all over Central and Eastern Europe was a practice called rychlodabing, or speed dubbing in Czech, which consisted of one sole actor voicing all characters, with the original voices usually still audible beneath. This is how millions of people in the ČSSR encountered many forms of cinema for the first time in the 1980s, and how many foreign words became lodged (in a corrupted fashion) in everyday language. Some expressions (often curse words) were born. That’s popular culture at its liveliest.  Video Kings is an oral history monument to the art of rychlodabing and some of its masters, as well as a collective reminiscence from a time of political transformation, and how ordinary people were agents of that change in extraordinary ways.

Video Kings

Pavel and Eva are two teenagers who live a happy life full of McDonald's food, action movies and pop music. But one night, Pavel stumbles upon a secret gathering of intellectuals in the woods on his way to the video store. Not wanting to be discovered, the intellectuals attack him and the chief intellectual bites him in the leg. Some times later, he begins changing... Will the power of television, Eva's love and pop star Michal David's music save him from the intellectuals' evil clutches?