Episode list

"When I photographed Jan Palah in the Prague morgue on January 19, 1969, his face was yellow," says Predarg Popovic, cameraman, in the first sentence of the first episode of this series. In the following, the participants, then students of the FAMU film academy in Prague, recall their departure from the then much more liberal SFRY to Czechoslovakia in 1965. It was a country in the complete darkness of real socialism, a member of the Warsaw Pact, under the direct supervision of the USSR. But also a country with a rich culture. Then in 1968, the Prague Spring happened, a wave of democracy and freedom which, led by the then president Aleksandar Dubcek, changed everything, gave Czechs and Slovaks hope for a better tomorrow and, as they believed, "socialism with a human face". But the Soviets did not sit idly by and on August 21, 1968, together with five other Warsaw Pact member countries, they occupied Czechoslovakia and stopped those democratic changes. About fifty people died, the rest resigned themselves to their fate, and important filmmakers Milos Forman, Ivan Paser or Jan Kadar emigrated. Participant witnesses talk about the ways in which they left occupied Czechoslovakia, as well as the events that preceded it, in the first episode.

On the same day and at the same time, a general strike began at all faculties in Prague as a protest against the Soviet occupation. We, of course, participated in it. Rajko Grlic and I were in charge of culture," says Srdan Karanovic, the director, remembering the summer of 1968 in Prague, and Rajko Grlic adds the story of the visit of the famous actress Jeanne Moreau to the rebellious students. The strike and sporadic protests, however, did not succeed and the USSR troops remained in Prague. Protesting against this and the lethargy of his compatriots, on January 16, 1969, student Jan Palach set himself on fire on Wenceslas Square in the center of the Czechoslovak capital. Pega Popovic is one of the few people who photographed the body of Jan Palah in the Prague morgue. Those photos, as a big exclusive, were published by the world's leading magazines, among them the French Paris Sword and the Italian Epoch. This , on one level, tells the story of how Popovic managed to take those photos at a time when Soviet tanks were still on the streets of Prague (or somewhere around the corner) and how his professor, the writer Milan Kundera, brought a journalist Parry the sword to him and said to her: "If anyone can give you what you need, it's him!" Popovic gave her the photos, but he also set her one rather strange condition - that he not be signed as the author. This information opens up new levels of this story, it tells about the fears that our students had at that time in occupied Czechoslovakia, but also about how today that extraordinary heroic gesture of Jan Palah is somewhat forgotten in his homeland.

"In addition to the photo of the dead Jan Palah that the whole world saw, I also recorded the protests caused by his self-immolation and all other events in Prague during those few days with a film camera. I submitted all those materials to the faculty. I have never seen them," says Predrag Pega Popovic at the beginning of the third episode. Professor Popovic would like to see now what he used to record, so the trip takes us to Prague. We visit the hospital where Palah died, his mound at the Olsani cemetery, the studio of the sculptor Olbram Zoubek who made the death mask, Charles University where the coffin with his body was. At FAMU and the National Film Archive of the Czech Republic, we are trying to find Peg's footage from that time. Along with our cameras, Pega Popovic records all this with a film camera, the same one he used to film in 1969. Those film materials, now so rare, give a special gamut to this, the final episode of the series.