The Snowdrop Festival

The Snowdrop Festival

This movie is based on texts of Bohumil Hrabal, world-known Czech prosaic. It's a story (in a form of a mosaic of short episodes and pictures) about the sadness and happiness of inhabitants of Kersko (Kersko is a small woody area full of cottages and roods). These people are both simple and sensitive, they have their own pleasures (e.g. Leli is a collector of cheap, but inutile things) and the greatest delight of all of them is a hunting. Crude poetics of amateur hunting is screened by dreamy pictures of this area. Menzel mixes sentimental lyricism and rough (but not vulgar!) humor and the outcome is the never-ending landscape of continuous life in the proximate nearness of nature. The performances of actors are brilliant. Both Rudolf Hrusinsky as a Franz and Jaromír Hanzlik as a Leli have nonrecurring charm bottomed on a pain and inebriation. Only the music is not perfect: Jiri Sust usually assembled his film music from his older works and in this movie there is many quotations.

Cast for The Snowdrop Festival...

Josef Somr
kapitán VB Vyhnálek
Petr Čepek
řezník
Petr Brukner
traktorista Janeček
Rudolf Hrušínský
traktoristův pomocník
Jiří Schmitzer
hostinský Láďa Novák
Marie Spurná
Novákova žena
Blažena Holišová
Francova žena
Zdeněk Svěrák
řidič trabanta
Bohumil Hrabal
muž vynášející septik
Milada Štýbrová
Long-haired Tennis Player(uncredited)
Josef Abrhám
Narrator in Radio (voice)
Petr Skarke
Voice in TV (voice)
Jana Štěpánková
Voice in TV (voice)
Miroslav Moravec
Voice in TV (voice)
Lubomír Kostelka
Voice in TV (voice)