SERVANTS

SLUŽOBNÍCI

By Ivan OSTROCHOVSKY

NEW HORIZONS INT'L FILM FESTIVAL / NEW HORIZONS ASSOCIATION - as DISTR Theatrical, TV, DVD-video, VOD, POLAND / FEST

Drama - Completed 2020


Festivals
& Awards

Berlinale - EFM 2020
Encounters
    • Year of production
    • 2020
    • Genres
    • Drama
    • Countries
    • SLOVAKIA, ROMANIA, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND
    • Languages
    • SLOVAKIAN
    • Duration
    • 80 mn
    • Director(s)
    • Ivan OSTROCHOVSKY
    • Writer(s)
    • Ivan OSTROCHOVSKY
    • Producer(s)
    • Ivan OSTROCHOVSKY (PUNKCHART FILMS)
    • Synopsis
    • The Catholic Church is having a hard time in Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s. The communist regime threatens to crush it unless it submits to strict control and accepts restrictions on freedom of belief and expression. The clergy is divided into the regime-critical “catacomb church”, which maintains contact with the Vatican and Western media, and the “ecclesiastical hierarchy” which cooperates with those in power and is represented by the state-sponsored priests’ association Pacem in Terris that existed in the ČSSR from 1971 to 1989. This is the context in which young seminarians Michal and Juraj have to decide whether to remain faithful to their vocation and idealism or to bow to pressure from the secret police. Ostrochovský has created an austere, overwhelming black-and-white work in which he artfully contrasts the pallor of marble, plaster and faces with the darkness of the night and the black cassocks. A frosty film noir in which, just a few years before the collapse of the totalitarian system, the forces of history and the servants of two powers and two belief systems collide.