322
Dir. Dušan Hanák | Czechoslovakia | 1969 | 94 min. | Slovak | subtitles in Lithuanian and English
February 10th, 18:00 @Muzeoteka
The debut film by director Dušan Hanák, the psychological drama 322 (1969), tells the story of Jozef Lauko, a man who learns he has an unspecified illness and is forced to reevaluate his life, past decisions, and moral responsibilities. Lauko interprets his situation both as a punishment for past deeds and as an opportunity to free himself from guilt and cleanse his conscience. The film was inspired by Ján Johanides’s short story The Sources of the Sea Attract the Diver, but it expands the character’s portrait by including his political actions and beliefs.
In the 1960s, while Czechoslovakia’s New Wave filmmakers—Miloš Forman, Jiří Menzel, and Věra Chytilová—were already actively creating, a new generation of artists was emerging at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU). Hanák was among them. He began working on 322 during Czechoslovakia’s period of greatest cultural and political openness but completed it only after the communist regime had consolidated power. Although the screenplay was approved in 1967, filming did not begin until after the Prague Spring. In 1969, the film was secretly smuggled to the Mannheim International Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prize, yet in its home country it was banned, “put on the shelf,” and only reached audiences in 1990 after the Velvet Revolution. Within this historical context, the film reflects not only the personal ilness of its protagonist but also the crisis of society, socialism, and the influence of a totalitarian regime on people’s lives. Hanák’s work consistently focused on authentic individuals who had preserved their inner freedom, and 322 remains one of the most significant examples of Czechoslovakia’s New Wave cinema. In 2021, Slovak film critics and scholars selected it as the film of the century in the country’s first centennial cinema poll.
