Pete Baker’s Blog

I intended to finish this post right after seeing the film the other week, but I’ve been so busy to blog about anything for the past few weeks that it kind of got stuck in draft form… oh well, better late than never.

So, Vron has been introducing me to Slovak and Czech culture, and the other weekend we went to see Marcela, a film by Helena Třeštíková /Taskovski Films. From what I gather, it was originally one of a group of documentaries of the lives of various Czech and Slovak people from the early 1980s to the present day. Indeed, the film starts in early 80s Warsaw-pact Czechoslovakia, and starts out as a fairly standard documentary of the life of Marcela, her marriage and birth of her first child, and her struggle to get on the state housing list for a place of her own, as initially, she is sharing cramped living quarters with her parents, husband and baby.

So as expected, it starts simply as a look behind the Iron Curtain, back in the 80s when the Cold War was at it’s peak. Here, documented by a film crew in a Warsaw Pact country, is the life of an ordinary Czech person, without any of the political commentary, propaganda or spin that you might expect from an Eastern Bloc film. That on it’s own would make the film an interesting watch – though having said that, the documentary was produced as a film in 2006, well after the Velvet Revolution, so the lack of communist propaganda is not surprising.

Then things change.

Things start going wrong for Marcela – her husband leaves her, and we begin to follow her struggle to bring up a child as a single mum in a communist state where jobs are difficult to come by. The film suddenly stops being a documentary and becomes something a lot more personal. It turns into a story – like something out of a tragic novel. I had to keep reminding myself that this was still a documentary, these were not ‘characters’ that I was getting attached to, and the events of the ‘plot’ did not come from the mind of some scriptwriter, but was just ordinary stuff that just happens to people all over the world every day.

Ultimately, you end up getting really attached to the lives of Marcela and her children, and that’s what makes it a winner. However, some parts of the film are almost unwatchable because of their emotional intensity. Go and see it if you can (I think it’s no longer on general release), but be ready for a bumpy ride, it’s a real emotional roller-coaster.