Larks on a String

Director: Jiří Menzel, Jiří Menzel

1969 / 94min / DCP

Like Menzel’s lauded Closely Watched Trains, the source of stinging satire Larks on a String was a novel by Bohumil Hrabal, but where the former film, made during a period of relaxed government censorship, went on to be an international arthouse hit, the latter, made after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague and subsequent authoritarian crackdown, was shelved by state censors until 1990. Recently restored for a new generation, the film depicts the years after Czechoslovakia’s 1948 Communist coup, when a group of suspect “bourgeois” who’ve been forced to work in a scrap metal yard as punitive re-education attempt to make the best of their plight, keeping up flirtations and friendships while knowing any one of them might disappear the next day.

Extended introduction by Czech film curator, Irena Kovarova on Friday, January 27th at 7:40pm