General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Daisies (1966 film)

Daisies (Czech: Sedmikrásky) is a 1966 Czechoslovak surrealist comedy directed by Věra Chytilová, her second feature film, in which two young women both named Marie decide to be as "bad" as the spoiled world around them and carry out a series of pranks, food orgies, and acts of destruction.¹ One of the most celebrated films of the 1960s Czechoslovak New Wave, it was delayed by censors, banned after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion, and later recognized as a feminist classic; in 2022 it ranked 28th in the Sight and Sound critics' poll of the greatest films of all time.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Sedmikrásky; working title Chudobky³
Director / year	Věra Chytilová, Czechoslovakia, 1966; her second feature¹
Runtime / format	76 minutes, color, aspect ratio 1.37:1, Czech language⁴
Lead cast	Jitka Cerhová (Marie I) and Ivana Karbanová (Marie II), non-professional actresses⁵^•¹
Key collaborators	Screenplay Chytilová, Ester Krumbachová, and Pavel Juráček; cinematography Jaroslav Kučera; music Jiří Šust and Jiří Šlitr; editing Miroslav Hájek⁵
Censorship	Service copy rejected February 1966; approved July 1966 after editing; banned after the 1968 invasion³^•⁶
Awards	Grand Prix, Bergamo Film Festival, 1967; Trilobit Award, 1967⁵
Standing	28th in the Sight and Sound 2022 critics' poll of greatest films²

Spoilers

Premise and style

The film follows Marie I, a brunette, and Marie II, a blonde, who conclude that everything in the world has gone bad and decide to go bad as well. They seduce and exploit older men for lavish meals, steal, stage food fights, and consume destructively, punctuating their escapades with the repeated exchange "Vadí? Nevadí" ("Does it matter? It doesn't matter").⁷ The two leads were played by non-professional actresses, Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová, whose doll-like performances the National Film Archive reads as a demonstration of female liberation in line with the feminist currents of the 1960s.¹^•⁷

Formally, the film abandons conventional narrative in favor of variations and repetitions, with ordinary plot and character development replaced by a game structure.⁸ Chytilová matched her anarchic subject with an equally radical aesthetic: fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stop-motion cutouts, tinted black-and-white sequences, and surreal costumes, all produced in close collaboration with cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera and costume and set designer Ester Krumbachová, who also co-wrote the script.⁴^•⁶ The film opens and closes with apocalyptic footage of war and destruction, framing the heroines' small-scale mischief against a violent world.⁷

Interpretation

Chytilová herself described the film as "a philosophical documentary in the form of a farce" and as "a morality play showing how evil does not necessarily manifest itself in an orgy of destruction caused by war, that its roots may lie concealed in the malicious pranks of everyday life".¹¹^•⁷ The story is broadly open to interpretation: as an attack on the establishment, a celebration of women's sexual liberation, or a skeptical critique of nihilism and declining social morality.⁹

Later critics have largely refused the moral condemnation that Chytilová and the Czech authorities applied to the heroines. The scholar Bliss Cua Lim argues that the doll-like quality of the Maries, their marionette movements and lack of emotional attachments, "is retooled as a celebration of female recalcitrance", while Katarina Soukup reads their carnivalesque inversions and parodies as mocking patriarchal constructions of femininity.⁷ The film's closing dedication, aimed at "those who only get upset over a trampled-on salad", has itself become one of its best-known features.¹¹

Production and censorship

The project began as a film story called "Chudobky" (Daisies) written for Chytilová by the screenwriter Pavel Juráček, who was studying at FAMU, Prague's film school, at the same time as she did.⁹^•⁸ Chytilová, the first woman to study directing at FAMU, had drawn attention with her early films Ceiling (1962), A Bagful of Fleas (1962), and her feature debut Something Different (1963).¹⁰

The state's main censorship body gave the screenplay a negative assessment, objecting to the girls' "gross cynicism" and their offensive lifestyle, on which the author took no position. Chytilová was advised to give the heroines an identity, psychology, and past that would explain their flaunting of social conventions, and to remove vulgarities and hints of a lesbian relationship between the girls. She partially gave in, and the script was approved despite reservations.⁹

Filming ran from 6 September to 18 December 1965 at Barrandov studios.³ Further trouble arose in postproduction, when it became clear that the film contained many improvised dialogues and that the composition of shots did not match the approved script; the service copy was rejected by the authorities in February 1966.⁹ Only in July 1966, after considerable editing, was the film given the green light. Money played a role: shot on imported color stock, the film had already been sold abroad, and a ban would have cost the state its investment and hard-currency earnings.⁹ Even then, officials continued to debate whether it should be released at all, and the press was not allowed to write about it, so the public did not know why a finished film waited months for its premiere on 30 December 1966.⁹^•³

Reception and banning

Abroad, the film was welcomed. It won the Grand Prix at the Bergamo Film Festival in 1967, the Trilobit Award from the Czech film and television fund FITES, and a Prix d'excellence at the UNIATEC competition in Brussels.⁵ In Britain, where it did not receive a theatrical release until 11 July 1968 at the Paris-Pullman cinema in South Kensington, paired with Lindsay Anderson's The White Bus, the reception was hostile; Anderson later recalled that "the London critics slaughtered Daisies".¹¹ A sympathetic American review by Louise Sweeney in The Christian Science Monitor in March 1968 called the film "brilliant" while noting it was "bound to alienate those who like the moral and the plot clear as Waterford crystal".¹¹

At home the film's fate worsened with the political climate. It was banned after the Soviet-led invasion of 1968 as part of the reaction against the Prague Spring, and Chytilová, who had already been barred from showing the film for a year after production and refused the state funding she depended on, could not make a film in freedom for nearly ten years.⁶^•⁷ The film was one of the few Czechoslovak films taken up by the Czechoslovak parliament, and it was later shelved in the "normalization" era.¹ The official complaint, as the Spanish daily El País summarizes it, was that in its roughly 75 minutes too much food, "the fruit of our farmers' labor", was destroyed; unofficially, officials did not understand its transgressive, anarchic images and discourse.⁶

Restoration and legacy

A digital release came out in 2008 under the Media EU Europe's Finest project, and in 2022 the film received a digital restoration, carried out at Prague's Universal Production Partners and Soundsquare studios alongside the National Film Archive, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and the State Cinematography Fund; this restored cut reached theaters beginning 2 June 2022, with a rating permitting viewers of every age.¹² The Criterion Collection issued a 4K restoration on Blu-ray in 2022, and Eye Filmmuseum screened a 4K restoration in the Netherlands in 2025.⁴^•¹³

Its critical standing has risen steadily. In the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll it ranked 28th among the greatest films of all time.² Contemporary reviewers have connected its exuberant, self-fashioning heroines to the twenty-first-century influencer aesthetic of Instagram and TikTok, and it holds an 86% Tomatometer rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 35 reviews.¹⁴ The film is now widely regarded as a touchstone of avant-garde and feminist cinema, and its influence extends through the Czech New Wave's reputation as a whole.¹⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026