Timid Dana is dumped by her lover. In an attempt to make him jealous, she talks her best friend into lending Dana her boyfriend. Thus begins Dana’s transformation from hapless outsider into a manipulative femme fatale capable of anything. Winner of the Caméra d’Or Special Distinction at the 1990 Cannes fest, Time of the Servants presents an image of society just before the fall of communism that the local regime wanted banned from the big screen.
The psychological thriller Time of the Servants offers up an excellent caricature of Czechoslovakia just prior to the Velvet Revolution. Although the film earned a Caméra d’Or Special Distinction at the 1990 Cannes film festival, it was nearly banned by the local pre-1989 censors. The story of timid medical student Dana’s transformation into an unscrupulous master of manipulation serves as a fitting critique of a society that by the late 1980s had descended into a mire of hopelessness and politically subservient decadence. In her stylistically distinctive debut, director Irena Pavlásková created an unprecedented anti-heroine, a femme fatale who, like the era’s political system, destroys individuals in the name of personal success.
Anna Kořínek
116 min / Color, DCP
Director Irena Pavlásková
/ Screenplay Irena Pavlásková
/ Dir. of Photography F. A. Brabec
/ Music Jiří Chlumecký, Jiří Veselý
/ Editor Jan Svoboda
/ Art Director Boris Halmi
/ Producer Václav Eisenhamer
/ Production Filmové studio Barrandov
/ Cast Ivana Chýlková, Karel Roden, Jitka Asterová, Libor Žídek, Miroslav Etzler
/ Sales Národní filmový archiv
Irena Pavlásková (b. 1960, Frýdek-Místek, Czechoslovakia). Selected filmography: Time of the Servants (1989), Corpus delicti (1991), A Time of Debts (1998), The Bitch’s Diary (2007), An Earthly Paradise for the Eyes (2009), Photographer (2015)
Národní filmový archiv
Závišova 5, 140 00, Praha 4
Czech Republic
E-mail: [email protected]
Tomáš Žůrek
Distributor, Sales Agent
Irena Pavlásková
Film Director
Jiří Chlumecký
Music Composer
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