Czech Children of Stalinism documentaries to feature in New York festival

Children of Stalinism is the title of a series of documentary films about the often harrowing experiences of daughters of political prisoners in 1950s Czechoslovakia. It has just been announced that four of those films will feature in the New York Independent Film Festival, which takes place later this month. To find out more, Radio Prague spoke to the project’s producer, Zuzana Dražilová.

'Children of Stalinism'

“We have good expectations about how it will go there. The festival takes place between July 21 and 29 in New York City, in East Village Cinema, and our screening is on July 278, staring at 8 PM.”

The series has seven episodes, which of them will be shown in New York?

“Four of them. One is called ‘Dáša is Coming Back’, directed about Adéla Kroupová. It’s set in the Beskydy Mountains, and it’s the story of Dáša Ježová. Another documentary is about Miroslava Bočková, it is called ‘For My Dad’, and was directed by Jan Oraský and Kateřina Borecká. The third is entitled ‘One Life’, and it was directed by Iva Jestřábová, and it’s about a daughter of a political prisoner, called Lída Voříšková; she lives in Prague. And the last one is a film set in Slovakia. It’s called ‘I’m Not Afraid to Speak’, and it’s about Margita Zemanová whose father was executed and her mother spent seven years in prison.”

When the series was shown in the Czech Republic, it was known as Daughters of the 1950s, but now it’s called Children of Stalinism. Why did you change the name?

Zuzana Dražilová

“Because Daughters of the Enemy – that was in fact the original name – was a project of audiovisual testimonies of daughters of political prisoners. It was a different project in the sense that we were shooting with 37 daughters of political prisoners from the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We did these testimonies in a static way, the women are sitting down and we interview them. Children of Stalinism is a continuation of this project, and this year, we are shooting another part about the sons of political prisoners.”