Official Selection – Hot Docs Festival 2026
Karlovy Vary Crystal Globe winner
“Plays as part fever dream, part paean to rural life, all while focussing deeply on these brothers and their menagerie of animal companions and myriad mishaps.” – Jason Gorber, POV Magazine
“A film that will stay with you for sensory and philosophical reasons alike.” – Victor Fraga, Dirty Movies
A talking cow narrates the lives of identical twin brothers living alone on a remote farm in Czechia’s Šumava mountains. From the outset, the film makes it clear this is no ordinary story. Based loosely on Czech journalist Aleš Palán’s book of the same name, director Miro Remo’s Better Go Mad in the Wild is a wildly original portrait of Franta and Ondra, whose days pass by in an offbeat rhythm of tending to their livestock, arm-wrestling, smoking joints and philosophizing about life. Their bond is both inseparable and volatile, bound by a sometimes wordless connection only twins share. Yet even the smallest disagreements carry weight, and through Remo’s lens their everyday routines and quarrels gradually take on an almost mythic quality. Blurring the boundaries between documentary observation and dreamlike invention, Remo mirrors the pair’s eccentric existence with fantastical flourishes, surreal humour and strikingly cinematic imagery. Deliriously absurd, funny and unexpectedly moving, this singular film invites audiences into a world suspended somewhere between reality and fable. Carmen Thompson, Hot Docs
In Czech, with English subtitles.
