After attending his mother’s funeral, where he meets an old flame, officer Arnošt returns to his security duties at a military facility in Josefov. He spends his days carrying out his job routinely. In the evenings he gets drunk at the local pub, where Marie, who is in love with him, works. For Arnošt, she is just a hobby, a substitute for the love he left behind in his hometown. Just as the rest of his current life is a substitute for the life he could have had long ago.
Drahomíra Vihanová
Filmmaker born in Czechoslovakia in 1930 and died in Czechia in 2017. She studied Musicology and Piano in Brno, before graduating in Direction and Editing at the FAMU in Prague, like many other filmmakers responsible for the regeneration of Czechoslovak cinema in the 1960s. Her first feature film, ‘A Squandered Sunday’ (1969), is a dark psychological drama that captures the hopelessness and futility of life. It was not released in cinemas until 1990 for political reasons. Vihanová then turned to documentary filmmaking and television, becoming a leading representative of the existentialist trend in Czechoslovak documentary filmmaking. She was only able to direct fiction again from 1989 onwards. In 2014 she was awarded the Czech Lion for her contribution to Czech cinema.
DIRECTOR
Drahomíra Vihanová
SCREENPLAY
Drahomíra Vihanová, Jirí Krenek
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Petr Volf, Zdeněk Prchlík
EDITOR
Miroslav Hájek
SOUND
Dobroslav Šrámek
MUSIC
Jiří Šust
PRODUCTION
Richard Němec
PRODUCTION COMPANY
Barrandov Studios
CAST
Ivan Palúch, Míla Myslíková, Ota Zebrák, Petr Skarke, Irena Boleslavská, Vladislav Dražďák, Jan Vostrčil, Alexandra Haškovcová
