The Czechoslovak New Wave Collection - Volume 1

Triple bill of Czechoslovakian New Wave films. In 'A Blonde in Love' (1965) young factory worker Andula (Hana Brejchova) meets a pianist at a dance in her rural town and spends the night with him. After he leaves she becomes infatuated with him and accepts his flippant invitation to visit him in Prague.

In 'The Party and the Guests' (1966) a group of happy, carefree picnickers are accosted by a group of thugs led by sadist Rudolf (Jan Klusák) who quickly gains an unbreakable hold over the group and subjects them to a cruel psychological game in which he acts as an interrogator. The ordeal is interrupted by the arrival of a stranger (Ivan Vyskocil) who invites the whole party to a nonsensical yet elegant and formal outdoor banquet. As the bizarre games continue, one member of the party chooses to run away, leading the entire group to take arms and hunt him down.

'Larks On a String' (1990) tells the stories of the various characters interned in a labour camp in 1950s Communist-run Prague. The residents have been deemed counter-revolutionary and bourgeois by the Czech government and are forced to spend their days sorting out piles of scrap metal for the purposes of re-education. As they toil, the workers, who include a literature professor, a public prosecutor, a dairyman, a saxophonist, a barber and a cook, philosophise and flirt amid the detritus of industrial society.