Oratorio for Prague

The camera glides through the streets of Prague in August 1968, capturing not a ceremonial facade but the living tissue of a city at a historical breaking point. Director Jan Němec focuses on faces — bewildered, resolute, questioning. Tanks on cobblestones, barricades made from tram cars, posters on walls. This is not a chronicle in the usual sense, but a poetic document where each frame becomes a metaphor for the fragility of freedom before a faceless machine. The film was shot in secret, edited abroad, and the footage itself was banned for decades.