Life remains a construction site for the tenants in a Prague prefabricated housing estate that is only halfway finished. Between the houses, young mothers have to struggle through mud with their baby carriages, and there are also many problems in the apartments: here a corpulent man gets stuck because of an immovable door, there no water comes out of the tap, but a dialog from the neighbouring apartment comes through the pipe. And there is no escape from the boiler room because the door handle is missing.
Věra Chytilová's feature film depicts a day in this structural chaos through the experiences of a handful of people of different ages who have to find their way through the chaos of a permanent temporary home designed as a "garden suburb". Věra Chytilová, 2002: "This is not a critical reaction to the regime, but rather an observation of human behavior." Nevertheless, her amusing social satire was held back for two years and was not performed in the Czechoslovakia until 1981.
Věra Chytilová is one of the few women involved in the famous Czechoslovak New Wave in the 1960s. Otherwise, names such as Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer, Jaroslav Papoušek and Jiří Menzel are mainly mentioned. Chytilová became famous with Sedmikrásky (Little Thousand Beauties) from 1966.
This film will be shown as part of the "Czech Film Wednesday" series, as always in the original version with German subtitles.
If you would like to be reminded of Film Wednesday in good time and receive further information on Czech culture in the Elbe/Labe Euroregion, you can subscribe to our cultural newsletter.
