Batalives

Directed by Petr Babinec and Karolína Zalabáková

With Martin Siničák

In the 1920s, Tomas Baťa and his stepbrother Jan Antonín Baťa, entrepreneurs from Zlin, Czechoslovakia, began establishing new cities worldwide to expand their business. Over the next decades, about fifty towns were built on their unique social and architectural model, but only a few remain today. Our film explores the lives of people in these surviving “Bata cities”: Zlín in the Czech Republic, Bata-Borovo in Croatia, Batanagar in India, Bataypora in Brazil, and Batadorp in the Netherlands. Characters like Matea, Shona, Bé, Henrik, and Věra, despite their differences, are linked by their shared history. The film questions how the vision of a brilliant business dreamer has evolved nearly 100 years later.