1-World Festival of Foreign Films
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"Oratorio For Prague"
1968
Directed by Jan Nemec

A unique document of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and one of the most powerful documentaries  ever made, Oratorio for Prague "is a film so moving that one is near tears from the first moment after the credits appear. The movie was begun as a documentary about the liberalization of Czechoslovakia and then simply continued when the Russian tanks moved in," wrote Renata Adler in The New York Times. The only filmed record of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the raw footage for Oratorio for Prague, when broadcast by television, was seen by more than 600 million people, and offered the  first information that the Soviet Army had not been "invited" in. "The movie is shot in a style so poetic and gentle that the humanism and generosity of spirit, which seemed about to radiate from Alexander Dubcek and Czechoslovakia into the world, is there intact...The whole film is marked with the restraint and beauty of Jan Nemec's style" - New York Times. Also includes never-before-seen scenes from the Prague Spring before the invasion. Narrated in English. Black and white.  26 minutes.