The Art of Dissent

"The Art of Dissent" celebrates the resilience and power of artistic engagement in Czechoslovakia before and after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. The documentary’s main protagonists – Václav Havel, banned singer Marta Kubišová, and the underground rock group the Plastic People of the Universe (PPU) – became the most recognizable dissidents during the 1970-80s. Havel bridged the disparate clusters of individuals and fused the literary, musical, political, and philosophical nonviolent elements into a hybrid network that eventually toppled the totalitarian regime in 1989.

The film speaks to our contemporary political malaise by underscoring the resolve and courage of dissidents who strove to re-build a battered civil society with artistry, tolerance, and truth. “The Art of Dissent” team presents the film to festivals with the excitement of first-time filmmakers.

A unique co-production of NUtech Ventures at the University of Nebraska and Czech TV in Prague, "The Art of Dissent" combines rare archival footage with interviews with key dissidents filmed over three years in the Czech Republic, England, and the United States. Location interviewing began in Prague with associate producer, Mariana Čapková (a young politician), and with second camerawoman, Susan Pahlke (who is by day an attorney in South Dakota) in 2017. Thirty interviews were filmed over three years. Parallel with this, the director began to work closely with Martin Bouda (Czech TV film archivist) and Alena Jirásek (Australian-based researcher and translator whose family went into exile in 1969) to review, select, and edit the archival footage.

Finding archival film and music of banned dissidents presented real challenges. How does one make a movie about “enemies of the state” not allowed to be filmed or photographed? Our quest brought us to the BBC and dozens of other clandestinely made films found in archives throughout Europe and America, as well as to several important private holdings in the Czech Republic. It took over two years to find and negotiate the rights for the music and films used in the movie. In this process, our team discovered forgotten film in a German archive of Shirley Bassey singing James Bond’s “Goldfinger,” of all songs, and “What Now My Love” in Prague just days before the invasion. From Josef Dlouhý we learned how the police confiscated his underground documentary about the Plastic People of the Universe and threatened the young filmmaker with prison if he did not permit state TV to turn his film into a nasty documentary broadcast on TV to demonize the musicians. In assembling the archival footage, we were also given unprecedented usage of the Czech TV archives, and Martin Bouda uncovered other rare gems, such as the never-before used color film of the 1968 invasion discovered in the forgotten suitcase of a Catalonian businessman and acquired by Martin for Czech TV in October 2017. The archival materials our team uncovered are truly extraordinary, as are the friendships that evolved in making this film.

The final cut was finished in Prague with Czech editor Evženie Brabcová and producer David Hanzal at FRMOL Production. Alena Jirásek joined the director and the production team in Prague to complete the film. The voiceovers were recorded at Czech TV. Alena did the translations for both the Czech the English language version. Our American Executive Producer, Arpi Siyahian, who grew up in Bagdad, has overseen all the financial and legal aspects of the film for NUtech Ventures, which controls the rights to the film.