Family Matters

Later life film? or Czech films that have kind of been forgotten II.

Directed by Jiri Svoboda, Czechoslovakia 1990, 114 min.

In 1965, Jaromíra Kolárová wrote an autobiographical novel about the political trials of the 1950s, which Jiří Svoboda decided to film before 1989. Due to a delay in filming, the film was not released until 1991. Nevertheless, it is one of the titles of a groundbreaking period in which the state's control over the ideological trends of domestic cinema was loosening. The protagonist of the story, for which Václav Šašek wrote the screenplay, is a lawyer Steiner-Kamenický, who is accused of an anti-state conspiracy. Jan's friend, the communist Mrázek, ends up the same way. A big political trial is about to take place and they and other innocents will be convicted, whether they admit their fictitious guilt under duress or not. Injustice will also fall heavily on the families of those arrested... Svoboda has backed this intensely dramatic story with convincing performances by Jiří Bartoška, Jaromír Hanzlík and Marta Vančurová.
However, one cannot overlook the director's noticeable alibismus - the story, reminiscent in its construction of London's better known Confessions, sounds as if the victims of terror were only honest communists who were unspeakably tormented by evil communists...

Introduction by film historian Jan Lukeš, in original version