04.08.2024

The vacations are over, but there's a Czech Film Wednesday: on August 7, we're showing the relatively unknown film "Probuzení" (Awakening) at 8 pm in the Zentralkino Dresden.

16-year-old Jitka is a member of a group of "hooligans" who mainly want to dance rock'n'roll, hang out in Prague's restaurants, bars and dance halls and commit petty theft. She is sent to a youth hostel, but quickly runs away again and returns to the "gang", whose leader, Wilda, is her boyfriend. The waiter's apprentice Tonek takes a liking to Jitka. The girl reciprocates his feelings, but at the same time she doesn't want to drag him into the abyss. But her cronies have no scruples. So Tonek becomes a member of their gang...

We only have a few films from the 1950s at Film Wednesday, which is simply because there are few good or popular Czechoslovakian films from this decade. The reason for this is the ideological cultural policy and the strict censorship. Probuzení is one of the few exceptions, even if from today's perspective we have to overlook some of the platitudes and woodcut-like depictions, which were probably not unusual for the cinema of the time. Director Jiří Krejčík had to bow to some requests for changes to his work, but he probably still managed to smuggle his most important messages past the censors. The film also offers an interesting - albeit only partial - insight into life in socialist Prague in the 1950s and, despite all the ideological over-shaping, is probably also a contemporary document.

More about the movie and tickets

(This is an automatic translation by DeepL Translator.)