Somehow the all-encompassing benefits of the socialist “paradise” of Czechoslovakia bypassed the group of old farmers shown in this 1972 documentary almost entirely, and they are shown bravely coping with dire poverty and privation. A plucky bunch, their bravery makes the fact that they have not received any benefits from the regime even more difficult to stomach. It’s surprising that this film was even allowed to be made, but when it was, it was put on the shelf until 1988 when it aired at the Nyon International Film Festival in Switzerland, a festival of documentary films. There, it won top honors.
Dusan Hanák (April 27, 1938 in Bratislava) is a Slovak movie director.
Hanák graduated from the FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts) in Prague in 1965. He began with a series of shorts at the Koliba film studios in Bratislava. Several of them received awards, and so did his first feature film 322 (the code for cancer in medical records of diseases, 1969).
Hanák followed it with the still admired feature-length documentary Pictures of the Old World/Obrazy starého sveta (1972), partly a meditation on what lies hidden beneath the concept of “an authentic life”, a theme already addressed in 322. Although Hanák was treated with suspicion by the more repressive communist authorities that took over after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, he found an early refuge in a topic sufficiently removed from big politics to survive on the margins of official production and yet, executed with a finesse that gave it a wide international… read more
