Czechoslovak noir

In the traditional section presenting selected Czechoslovak film and television titles with noir aspects, you can look forward to Karel Kachyna’s adventure/psychological film Smugglers of Death (1959), in which a rookie border guard searches for a mysterious smuggler in the tricky Šumava forests. We offer a counterview in the form of a miniseries by David Ondříček in the Special Screenings section. In Tragic Monday (1960), director Milan Vošmik, famous for his children’s and family films with a crime plot, depicts the coping of three nine-year-old boys with the weight of their conscience after a tragic accident happened to their classmate. A psychological drama set in a Slovak court setting, linked to a case involving the rape and murder of a girl, is offered by Martin Hollý Jr.’s A Case for the Defence Attorney (1964), whose dark Ballad of the Seven Hanged was featured last year. Drahomíra Vihanová’s feature debut, Squandered Sunday (1969), about a day in the life of Lieutenant Arnost, has an atmosphere of anxiety that is heightened by the knowledge that the film did not enter distribution until more than 20 years later and the director was not allowed to work in feature films. The section closes with Jiri Sequens Sr’s TV film Confrontation (1971), an adaptation of Patrick Quentin’s novel The Green-Eyed Monster, in which the protagonist must find the killer in order to remove suspicion from himself.

Veronika Zýková