Tribute to Vaclav Havel: Special Screening

Tribute to Vaclav Havel (1936 - 2011)

« Love and truth must triumph over hate and lies. » The man for whom this statement was a motto died last December. Lover of literature, rock fan, playwright, dissident-turned-president, tireless opponent of an alienating Communism, Vaclav Havel was also a fierce defender of freedom and human rights. By screening Leaving, his first and only film made a few months before his death, the FIFDH wishes to pay tribute to him.

The path followed by the philosopher-president was certainly an extraordinary one. Becoming a dissident in the 1960s - the brutal 1968 Prague Spring was a decisive phase - Vaclav Havel spent several years in prison. With a handful of other dissidents, the author of The Power of the Powerless (1978) developed Charter 77, a human rights manifesto. 

An icon of the Velvet Revolution that in 1989 quietly showed Czechoslovakia's Communist regime the door, he suddenly found himself president of his country. He fulfilled this role until 1992, continuing in office until 2003 after his country became the Czech Republic. Havel established a participatory democracy, affiliated the Czech Republic to NATO (1999), and piloted the country's adhesion to the European Union (2004). 

Havel had been passionately devoted to art and cinema since his childhood. Hardly a coincidence, given that his father and uncle had founded the famous Barrandov cinemas, Czechoslovakia's answer to Hollywood. The anti-bourgeois struggle had stripped his family of its means and Havel had to learn a trade... until fate willed otherwise. The theatre opened its doors to him. Starting as a stagehand, he became the artistic director of Na Zabradli, an avant-garde creative theatre. A renowned playwright, he continued to be fascinated by cinema after leaving the political scene. With Leaving, filmed in 2010 and screened in Prague in March 2011, his dream was finally realized.

Tuesday 6th of March, 18:30 at the Alhambra