Ostrochovsky, Pekarcik, Kerekes: Velvet Terrorists
Yesterday a new Slovak documentary had its world premiere in Karlovy Vary. It will have a long life on festivals around the world. If you say to someone that they are going to watch a film about people, who fought against the Communist regime in Czekoslovakia, their first thought would probably be that here comes another black & white film, probably with a lot of interviews and a commentary, and for sure with Havel as one of the heroes.
What you get with “Velvet Terrorists” is completely different. It is a hybrid documentary, hilarious in tone, full of playful surprises in storytelling, and Historytelling, you sense immediately that Peter Kerekes is one of the three directors and the main producer, who continues his “retro” work from “Cooking History” and “66 Seasons”
Stano, Fero and Vladimír are the three characters – very different and with very different, more or less quirky stories of resistance against the Communist regime. Stano wanted to blow a first-of-May-parade-platform into pieces, Fero had bigger ambitions as he wished to kill the country’s leader, Husak, and Vladimir performed, among other things, explosions of propaganda billboards. They all served prison sentences.
The film has definitely a touch of comedy, also in its staged scenes. Stano is single and his story – the three characters come one after the other – goes mainly from him dating several girls to him with his MCP (male chauvinist pig) pals in a car discussing women’s look, to him on his bed checking his blood
pressure. He is the least sympathethic encounter in the film but the filmmakers do what they can to make also him “a romantic hero”, when they place him and the girl friend at a lake at sunset…
Fero is married with two kids, and the story about him must have been easy to shoot as he creates a fine atmosphere around him and has a talent for acting. As when he teaches one of the sons how to escape safely in a car in a James Bond-like scene. He planned the big coup with a girl friend, who he tries to get in contact with, without success, and the assassination attempt on Husak failed as Fero did not get in contact with a foreign secret service!
The third, and in the film also the last, terrorist in the story is Vladimir, and he is serious business! With no wife, tired of him getting in and out of prison, he keeps himself in very fit shape, which is used by the filmmakers to make him do a casting – among young girls – to find a girl, who can continue his resistance against the ones in power. He finds one and he trains her to be as fit as him, and in shooting and in how to make explosions that work, and how to “cheat” a lie detector.
This is a great twist to our times where there is so much to protest against. Good to know that Vladimir’s student is ready for resistance at the end of an original, intelligent and humurous documentary that is a pleasure to watch.
Slovakia, 2013, 87 mins.
http://www.kviff.com/en/films/film-detail/4173-velvet-terrorists/
