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Based on the best selling book by Bohumil Hrabal, winner of the Critic’s Award at the Berlin Film Festival and pleasing crowds wherever it goes, this hugely entertaining saga from veteran Czech director Jiri Menzel (winner of an Oscar and a Golden Globe for his feature film Closely Watched Trains) is a light-hearted take on a turbulent period in the history of 20th Century Czechoslovakia.

This screenplay follows on two parallel stories. This first follows the youthful exploits and gradual maturing of an ambitious young man before the war during the German occupation when, in love and stupidity rather than opportunism, he finds himself on the side of occupying power. The second story, interlinked with the first, concerns only a short period in his later life when, after years in prison, he seeks peace and solitude in an abandoned German village whose inhabitants were expelled after the war. His peace is only briefly disturbed by the arrival of a working-class woman. Her youth and vitality bring back memories of his amorous adventures as a young man.