The Button

A huge clothing factory, somewhere far away. Women and children sew buttons onto fabric in a monotonous rhythm, as if they too were part of the machinery. A small black beetle crawls up the wall, becoming a symbolic guide to everything happening. One worker has a picture of a little girl with a fabric rabbit in a frame at her workstation. The machines sew on buttons at a rapid pace. Suddenly they stop; one button is cracked. The sorting machine identifies the button as defective, cuts it off, and tosses it into the waste bin. After her shift, the worker secretly takes it home. She uses the button as an eye for her daughter’s tattered soft toy rabbit; a black beetle crouches in the rain outside the window. An explosion sweeps away everything around it, and only the rabbit remains lying on the ground, staring blindly with the eye made from the cracked button. The photographer’s lens captures it as a memento of the destruction. A giant raven snatches the button. The fabric rabbit now has a black hole where its eye should be, from which a crowd of little girls emerges. The white girls transform into seagulls and fly towards the harbour, from where large cargo ships set sail laden with goods from the factory. A whole flock of white seagulls sits on the harbour railing. We are transported to an opulent exhibition, somewhere in the world of luxury, dominated by a large photograph of a rabbit with a button for an eye. At the opening, even a woman in a factory-made jumper is sipping champagne, but all her buttons are flawless. The visitors gaze at the exhibition with empty eyes; they have black holes in place of eyes. They look, but they do not see. It is only when a black beetle scurries across the painting that one pair of empty eyes is compelled to see reality.

Director’s statement
"For several years I have focused mainly on work for children, whether in the short film Zuza in the Gardens, the bedtime story Vika, the Owl Made of Noodles, or in my own books. Now I feel a strong need to return closer to my beginnings and open myself to a freer, more symbolic form of storytelling while building on all my creative and technical experience.

Knoflík is conceived as an animated short film up to eight minutes long, combining hand-drawn and digital animation with drawing, pastel, glass painting, collage, and live-action elements. The visual style will be nearly monochromatic, built from shades of gray and brown, with one vivid accent: a green button.

Through the journey of a cracked button, the film reflects on child labor, inequality, indifference, and the emptiness of symbols that often replace real solutions, while still searching for fragile hope and humanity."