They Are Personally Responsible for Treason of the National Uprising!

Ján Kadár / Czechoslovakia / 1946 / Czech Premiere / 8 min.

synopsis

The Slovak National Uprising, as the purgatory of a compromised nation in Ján Kadár’s accounting film.

The second of Kadár’s two anti-fascist agitations also reveals a mature debutant. In addition to the director, the initiator and co-author of the theme, Ján Kalina, an important figure in the Slovak dramaturgy of early socialist film of the late 1940s, is behind both “edits”. Yet without the Soviet filter, the film shows, also in the form of maps, what the Uprising looked like geopolitically, and who were its main actors and victims. Together with Bielik’s For Freedom, it is the first film account of the SNP, a key event in modern Slovak history.

biography

Ján Kadár (1918–1979)
Ján Kadár’s Slovak career is relatively short: studies at the School of Arts and Crafts, a stay in a Jewish labour camp, one feature film (the building comedy Katka), and three remarkably mature short films. By the early 1950s, he was already working at Barrandov, in a team with Elmar Klos.