Catalogue of Czech Television Programmes
The story about the ambiguity of seeing good and evil in black and white was inspired by real events of the period between the 1950s and 1970s.Honza Steiner was no ruffian, no rascal. He was just a boy who happened to be unlucky in living in the wrong place at the wrong time. He slipped off the straight and narrow through a coincidence of historical events and unlucky strokes of fate. He came from a family that was half German and had not been moved out of the country after the war, but suffered injustice and humiliation in the border region of Czechoslovakia. His father fled the country by shooting his way across the border, and the situation thus changed from bad to worse for his unhappy wife and son. Honza was “brought up” at children’s homes, at an Institute for Correction and finally at prison. He led a long, undeclared war devoid of accepted rules with a certain police officer. The conflict came to a head with a staged man-hunt for the young man, who had been unlucky enough to shoot his sworn enemy. He was sentenced to death. That was the tragic end of his battle against the society of the day and its concrete representative.
SD | 108' | © 2001
director(s): Jiří Svoboda
producer(s): Czech Television
scriptwriter(s): Jiří Svoboda
director of photography: Ivo Popek
cast: Jan Dolanský, Petr Motloch, Matěj Hádek, Yvetta Kornová and others
original language: Czech
subtitles available: English