SHADOW COUNTRY
[KRAJINA VE STÍNU]
Director Bohdan Sláma (THE COUNTRY TEACHER) and screenwriter Ivan Arsenyev create the fictional village of Schwarzwald — a population that is part Austrian and part Czech, located near Austria's border with Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, then ceded to Czechoslovakia after the borders were redrawn following WWII — to explore the turbulent experiences of a divided people during the most terrible of times. Meticulously researched, the film is based on real-life events that occurred in the Sudetenland region in the 1930s and '40s, including the Austrian Anschluss and Nazi occupation, the forced expulsion of the Jewish community and post-war reprisals by Czechs against ethnic Germans, in many cases for opportunistic gain and led by the newly installed Communist authorities. This evocative black-and-white epic was filmed on location in the region its lensed by Sláma's long-time cinematographer Diviš Marek. DIR Bohdan Sláma; SCR Ivan Arsenyev; PROD Jindřich Motýl, Martin Růžička. Czech Republic/Slovak Republic, 2020, 135 min. In Czech with English subtitles. NOT RATED
No AFI Member passes accepted.
Run Time: 135 Minutes
Opening Date: Sunday, December 12, 2021
Genre: Historical drama