A 1966 Czech time bomb: when your dad's war hero stories don't match the silence in his eyes.
Michal's father and his friends are stigmatized by their war experience and the post-war social deformations in which they took part either directly, or watched them cowardly and in silence. They are trying to repress their feelings of guilt and justify their behavior to the young generation with memories of their heroic war feats. Michal, however, does not want to have anything to do with their problems. He subconsciously perceives the unpleasant atmosphere in the family as well as his father's hypocrisy. After one of many quarrels with his father, he runs away from home, determined to go his own way.
Acting
Hanzlík's simmering teenage contempt is physically visible in every frame.
Direction
Čuřík and Máša trap you in suffocating domestic spaces.
Writing
Dialogue where what's unsaid crushes what is spoken.
Director
Jan Čuřík
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Made during the Prague Spring's thaw, the film interrogates 1945-48 'heroism' that the Communist state preferred mythologized. Its 5.1 TMDB rating reflects near-invisibility, not quality.
Máša co-wrote while blacklisted; Čuřík was a documentarian. Their collaboration creates a fiction that feels surveilled, like state evidence.
XC
