On September 24, we will celebrate the 100th birthday anniversary of the writer Ladislav Fuks, a Czech novelist, author of mainly psychological prose with the theme of the anxiety of a person threatened by lack of freedom and violence.

For the September screening, we have therefore chosen one of the most fundamental films of the Czechoslovak new wave of the 1960s, movie: The Cremator (1968) directed by Juraj Herz.

Annotation: The dark and absurdist story, which utilises elements of the psychologically grotesque, represents one of many 1960s works by author Fuks that deal with issues of Jewish identity and alienation in a brutal world. The protagonist in Spalovač mrtvol (The Cremator, 1969) is 1930s crematorium worker Karel Kopfrkingl, who loves his work and family – in fact, he loves them so much, that he decides to kill his wife and two children in a loving and professional way, since under the new Nazi ideology, Kopfrkingl’s mother-in-law, who is of “non-Aryan” origins, and the entire “miserable” family, have no right to exist. Kopfrkingl denounces his friends and colleagues to the Gestapo and takes part in a campaign against the Jews. The kind-hearted and dutiful man is being transformed into a psychopathic murderer by the ascendant ideology of Nazism – and paradoxically, by an essentially peaceful, though misappropriated Buddhist philosophy.

Source:  Filmovyprehled.cz

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For more information about the screening and tickets, please visit this link.