Five years ago, the KV Festival organized a retrospective of documentarist Karel Vachek, and this year, footage from an allegedly lost film was presented for the first time in the framework of the KVIFF Talk. They show treatment of burnt, but still responding Jan Palach. “I have never seen anything such horrendous in my entire life!” revealed the documentarist.
Vachek began to prepare a new film in 1968. He was video-recording the Russian tanks in the Prague streets or the politicians’ speeches, but what the most important was his secret visit to Palach in the hospital, where the twenty-year old student of the Faculty of Philosophy was dying of severe burns for three days. Parts of the film now reappeared after almost half a century. They were in the possession of Petr Brada, who participated in the production of Vachek’s documents at that time. Only recently, Branda’s wife offered them to the National Film Archive following his death. And that is where two weeks ago, Karel Vachek saw them again after all those years.
“I could not watch. It was horrible, I simply kept closing my eyes”, the author describes his experience. Despite his feelings, Vachek decided to show the footage at the Festival and also include it in his prepared film Communism. Apart from the Vachek’s new project, his producers Radim Procházka and Mikuláš Novotný showed teasers of all substantial Vachek’s works, “from cinema verité to film novels”- during the one-hour panel.
The full article by Zbyněk Vlasák is available in Thursday’s Festival Daily.
