Mud Covered City

This short documentary by Václav Táborský depicts the ups and downs of life on a new housing estate in Prague’s Malešice district. The film captures the enthusiasm of young families moving into their new flats, but also the setbacks associated with mass construction at the time: muddy streets, failures in the water supply, and heating problems. “The greatest impediment to documentary filmmaking in communist countries, still apparent well into the 1960s (Poland was perhaps something of an exception), was the approval system. The filmmaker had to first submit a script and then he was permitted to shoot life as it played out – unsurprisingly – in a way that was typically quite different from a fictitious literary plot. Today it’s ironic that we had to write the screenplay for events which hadn’t yet occurred or ran their course, but that’s how it was,” states director Táborský on filming conditions in communist Czechoslovakia. The film will be screened in its digitally restored version together with A Bag of Fleas by Věra Chytilová. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)