Film

“Revolutionary... often deeply moving and is always under conscious and complex control.”
—The New York Times

Winner of the Golden Bear at the 1969 Berlin Film Festival, this Yugoslavian Black Wave satire follows a group of slogan-spouting Marxist revolutionaries who travel out to the sticks in order to radicalize their “unenlightened” country comrades—only to have their ideological naiveté blow up (literally) in their faces. In his feature debut, Serbian provocateur Želimir Žilnik combines a blistering, furiously energetic visual style with a subversive political punch.

This stirring record of the funeral of Jan Palach—the Czech student who committed self-immolation in protest of the Soviet occupation of his country—was smuggled out of Czechoslovakia and defiantly distributed by Grove Press.