General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Long Live the Republic!

Long Live the Republic! (Ať žije republika) is a 1965 Czechoslovak war drama directed by Karel Kachyňa and written with Jan Procházka, which shows the final days of World War II in a Moravian village through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy.¹^•² It was produced at Barrandov Studios with Czechoslovak Army Film, premiered on 5 November 1965, and is often cited as an early precursor to the Czech New Wave.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Ať žije republika; second title Já a Julina a konec veliké války (Me and Julina and the End of the Great War)¹
Premiere	5 November 1965, Czechoslovakia¹
Runtime	132 min per Filmový přehled; Film Fest Gent lists 134' and CUNY TV 127 min¹^•³^•⁴
Key personnel	Director Karel Kachyňa; script Jan Procházka and Karel Kachyňa; cinematography Jaromír Šofr; music Jan Novák¹
Lead cast	Zdeněk Lstibůrek (Olda), Naděžda Gajerová, Vlado Müller, Gustáv Valach, Jurij Nazarov, Iva Janžurová¹
Budget	Raised from 5.5 million to 8.35 million crowns, almost three times the budget of an average Czechoslovak feature of the early 1960s⁵
Distribution history	1,153,983 viewers until the film was pulled from distribution in June 1970⁵

Spoilers

Story and themes

The film is set in the village of Nesovice in Moravia in the spring of 1945, as the German occupation collapses and Soviet forces approach.² Its protagonist is Oldřich Vařeka, called Olda, a small, anxious 12-year-old bullied by village boys and beaten by his authoritarian father, whose world is shaped as much by domestic fear as by the war.²^•⁶ His only friend is Cyril (Gustáv Valach), a neighbor who raises dogs and is himself a target of the villagers' hatred.⁷^•³

Olda's father orders him to hide the family's horse, their only possession, in the woods; when the boy loses the mare, Julina, to soldiers of the retreating German army, he makes a reckless decision to recover her.³ Both the retreating Germans and the arriving Soviet troops are sources of danger for the boy, tied less to ideology than to the threat they pose to the family's livelihood.² Villagers loot abandoned property and turn on neighbors accused of collaboration, and the film offers no traditional celebration of victors or mockery of the defeated; the authors stated they wanted to express "the psychological maturation of a country boy who discovers the tragic aspects of life during dramatic and festive moments."⁵ In the final scenes the new occupying force arrives under banners reading "Long Live Stalin" and "Long Live the Soviet Union," treated with indifference by the villagers.⁸

Style

Kachyňa blends harsh realism with dreamlike subjectivity: the main story line in the present tense is supplemented by the hero's memories, fantasies, and dreams, and Kachyňa deliberately avoided visual markers to separate them, saying it might take viewers a while to distinguish dreams from reality.⁵ The film was shot in monochrome CinemaScope, and the average length of a scene is unusually short for the period.⁶^•⁵ It was cinematographer Jaromír Šofr's feature debut, combining naturalistic detail with expressive compositions that emphasize the child's isolation.²

Production

The literary script, preserving the main plot elements, was submitted for approval on 14 January 1964; the technical screenplay was approved on 14 May 1964 and filming began on 15 May 1964.⁵^•¹ The film was nominally intended as a representative title commemorating the 20th anniversary of the liberation of Czechoslovakia, and was expected to be a longer, bigger-budgeted two-part widescreen epic.⁵^•⁶

Army involvement. The film was made in collaboration with the Ministry of National Defence and Czechoslovak Army Film, whose participation was crucial: the crew could use military equipment in front of the camera and shoot some scenes from military helicopters, and the army released three recruits from duty, including cinematographer Šofr.⁵ The demanding production, with many action sequences and extras, ran from May 1964 to 18 May 1965; more than 1,800 scenes were filmed at eighty different locations, mostly exteriors, with the village of Únanov near Znojmo hosting the crew for the most days.⁵^•¹

Casting. Out of tens of thousands of boys who auditioned, Kachyňa chose Zdeněk Lstibůrek, who was voiced by Jan Kraus in post-production; Kachyňa later described the 14-year-old as his best child performer.⁵^•⁶ Casting complications arose when the Soviet studio Mosfilm sent Yuri Nazarov instead of the chosen actor Vladimir Ivashov.⁵

Music. Because the rushed post-production was driven by the film's candidacy for the Venice festival, the contractually obligated composer Zdeněk Liška was unavailable, and Jan Novák, who composed music for seven of Kachyňa's films in the 1960s, replaced him. After the events of August 1968, Novák emigrated and Kachyňa began collaborating with Liška.⁵

Release and reception

The premiere missed the May anniversary of the Liberation because of the demanding production and post-production; the final copy was finished two and a half months late, and the film premiered on 5 November 1965.⁵^•¹ Public premieres were preceded by screenings for Czechoslovak State Film management, Communist Party Central Committee politicians, and president Antonín Novotný, who according to Kachyňa liked the film and allegedly defended it to the Soviet Ambassador, who considered it anti-Soviet; the Censorship Committee raised no objections.⁵ When the film was screened at the Moscow Film Festival, the audience was shocked at the way Russian "liberators" were depicted.⁴

The film won at Mar del Plata and, screened out of competition at other festivals, took the FIPRESCI award at San Sebastián in Spain.⁵ It drew 1,153,983 viewers before being pulled from distribution in June 1970, after which other Kachyňa and Procházka films also disappeared from cinemas, including A Carriage Going to Vienna (1966), which likewise portrays Czech behavior during liberation unflatteringly.⁵

Origins in Procházka's writing

At the end of the war Jan Procházka was a 16-year-old boy in Ivančice, South Moravia, a town liberated in April 1945 that saw pillaging, displays of cowardice, and cruel retribution alongside the celebrations. He drew on these ambivalent memories in stories that became the basis of his 13-chapter novella Ať žije republika, finished in 1963 and published in 1965, one month after the film's premiere, with illustrations by Jiří Trnka.⁹^•⁵ The film followed a series of coming-of-age films Kachyňa and Procházka made in the first half of the 1960s (Trápení, 1961; Závrať, 1962; Vysoká zeď, 1964), some of the first films to critically and non-dogmatically revise the recent past; the pair later moved on to post-war collectivization in The Nun's Night (1967) and the Stalinist purges in The Ear (1970).⁹

Later availability

The film remained relatively inaccessible abroad for decades, particularly in high-quality home video editions.² In 2026 the British label Second Run released its first Blu-ray anywhere in the world, scheduled for 16 March 2026, from a new high-definition transfer created by the Czech National Film Archive, with supplements including a 1998 City Cinematheque interview with Kachyňa, Jan Němec's 1963 short A Memory for the Present, and booklet notes by film historian Peter Hames.²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › War action and adventure › War action films released through 1999 › Released 1963 to 1998

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

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