All My Good Countrymen (1969) DVD

Winner of both the Best Director and the Jury Prizes at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, Vojt ch Jasný's auto-biographical All My Good Countrymen is one of the wonders of the Czech New Wave - but also one of the least-known films from that miraculous era of Czech filmmaking. Completed barely before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 it was immediately banned and never shown.
It's deceptively simple narrative weaves a complex tapestry around the interwoven lives and stories of a group of Moravian villagers immediately following the socialization of Czechoslovakia in 1948.

Director Vojt ch Jasný, hailed "the spiritual father of the Czech New Wave" by Milo Forman, fled Czecholslovakia following the completion of this film and went into exile rather than recant.

A pronounced influence on later films like Edgar Reitz's Heimat and Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, Jasný's film remains a potent reminder of lives and idealism lost under totalitarianism.

"The film and the milieu it so precisely evokes are not so much nostalgic as they are powerfully remembered and irrevocably lost.... All My Good Countrymen reflects the curdled fury of a former true believer"

J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

"A work of great lyricism, humour and originality" Gary Tooze, DVD Beaver

"Extraordinary poetic... the masterpiece of Vojt ch Jasný - father of that brilliant flowering of Czechoslovak cinema" The New York Times

"Jasný s lyrical masterpiece" Radio Praha

"A bitter-sweet, affectionate and pointed picture of a life many Czechs would have recognised. A key film from the Prague Spring" Time Out

Extras:
Interviews, Booklet essay + more TBC
Special Feature:
New HD restoration from the Czech National Archive with restored picture and sound.