Defiance and Compassion: The films of Vera Chytilova

This March the BFI Southbank and The Czech Centre are pleased to team up to present the first UK retrospective of Věra Chytilová, one of the key filmmakers of the 1960s.

When Věra Chytilová first applied to the Prague Film School, she controversially noted that she didn’t want to make films like her tutors. She later stated that she wanted ‘to put things together in a new way’ and, although she denied being a feminist, her films invariably focus on women rebelling against a male-dominated order. Her 1960s films provide a remarkable and inventive visual and aural approach – reflected in our Atrium exhibition on The Fruit of Paradise. However, her work was condemned as experimental and pessimistic following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and she was banned from the studios for six years. She returned with the commercially successful The Apple Game, and continued to challenge the values of both normalised ‘socialism’ and the new capitalism. The season is curated by Renata Clark, Czech Centre London.