Acting
In a small town in Nazi-occupied Slovakia during World War II, decent but timid carpenter Tono is named "Aryan comptroller" of a button store owned by an old Jewish widow, Rozalie. Since the post comes with a salary and standing in the town's corrupt hierarchy, Tono wrestles with greed and guilt as he and Rozalie gradually befriend each other. When the authorities order all Jews in town to be rounded up, Tono faces a moral dilemma unlike any he's known before.
Juraj Jakubisko's first feature film after a forced nine-year-long break is a story about an unconventional man, Jozef Matúš. He arrives to a small village in eastern Slovakia to settle down and start a family. He is ready to subordinate everything to his goal. It all starts with stealing building material and ends with him disregarding those close to him to a point where his ambitions are turning against him. Build a House, Plant a Tree is a viewer-friendly film with a plot resembling a western, including several attractive action sequences.
Young script-writer Frantisek (Petr Cepek) is hired to write a film script based on the successful novel Looking Back. He meets with the novel's female author, a University professor and writer named Olga Machová (Jirina Trebická), approximately ten-years-older than him. In the beginning, they do not understand each other at all. Frantisek is a skeptic experiencing a moral crisis, unsatisfied with both his work and his private life - he lives separated from his wife and has no deeper feelings for his numerous lovers. He even gets drunk from time to time and breaks the public peace. Olga is lonesome, too, but considers her life fulfilled.
Wartime events from a child's perspective were a popular theme during the previous regime - here it is a twelve-year-old village boy who experiences dangerous situations with retreating Nazi troops in picturesque South Bohemia... Any attempt to achieve a more believable depiction is destroyed by the staging's grandeur, and in the end the result is an awkward piece, suitable at most for celebrating the relevant national holidays. A longer copy with a tragic ending is stored in the NFA. Milda is shot unnoticed by an SS major.
