All My Good Countrymen

Director: Vojtech Jasný

1969 / 120min / DCP

Set between the years 1945 and 1958, when Czechoslovakian society was radically altered by a new Communist government under the Soviet sphere of influence, Jasný’s film—which earned him a Best Director award at Cannes and led to his eventual exile from his motherland—depicts the toxifying effects of collectivization on a community in rural Moravia. Drawn from the director’s memories of his hometown of Kelč, All My Good Countrymen is both a devastating depiction of the government’s betrayal of the Czechoslovak peasantry’s postwar optimism and a lyric ode to a traditional way of village life then fading into memory, with Krumbachová’s lovely costuming a paean to the homespun beauty and self-expression of folk dress.