흰눈이 내린 추운 겨울, 젊은 기관사 혼자는 들뜬 맘으로 기차역으로 향한다. 오늘은 그가 처음 기차의 운전대를 잡는 날이기 때문이다. 영화는 혼자의 조금은 특별한 일상을 보여주는 한편 그가 오고 가며 만나는 다양한 개성의 사람들을 생동감 넘치게 그린다. ‘재앙’조차 일상의 연장선 안에서 그리는 베라 히틸로바의 활기찬 시선이 돋보인다.
It is the summer of 1945. A party of young people are enjoying the beginning of a new life to the full. For them this is the year one. One of them, law student Pavel, is more attracted to film than to law. With his eight-millimeter camera, he films everything that catches his attention. One day he captures an interesting face on film, a girl with an air of mystery. Pavel visits the girl, whose name is Helena, and meets hers and her elder energetic sister Olga. From Olga, he learns that the girls have spent the years of German occupation in a concentration camp and cannot forget the horrors they have lived through.
This three-part ballad, which often uses music to stand in for dialogue, remains the most perfect embodiment of Nemec’s vision of a film world independent of reality. Mounting a defense of timid, inhibited, clumsy, and unsuccessful individuals, the three protagonists are a complete antithesis of the industrious heroes of socialist aesthetics. Martyrs of Love cemented Nemec’s reputation as the kind of unrestrained nonconformist the Communist establishment considered the most dangerous to their ideology.
