Rosy Dreams
7.2 /10 1 Votes7.2
Director Dusan Hanak Duration Language SlovakRomani | 7.2/10 IMDb Genre Comedy Screenplay Dusan Hanak, Dusan Dusek | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Release date 8 April 1977 Writer Dusan Dusek, Dusan Hanak Cast Similar movies Juraj Nvota and others appear in Rosy Dreams and I Love - You Love | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rosy Dreams (Ružové sny) is a 1977 Czechoslovak film. Despite its whimsical poetic style, it was the first Central European feature film that put the Romani (Gypsy) community at the center stage in a realistic manner. It was also a singular artistic achievement in Slovak and Czechoslovak cinema during the intensely repressive period after the Soviet invasion of 1968 by Dušan Hanák, director of several acclaimed films who maintained the integrity of his vision and style throughout the vagaries of Central European filmmaking in the second half of the 20th century. In a broader sense, Rosy Dreams was prescient in Central European cinema because it dealt with a minority group whose plight, not discussed openly then, has since become one of the key issues in several Central European societies. The clash of the communities is depicted with the subtle tender attitude inherited from the Czechoslovak New Wave.
Contents
Plot summary
Jakub (Juraj Nvota), a dreamy mail carrier in a sleepy village, spends his days playing pranks on everyone, resenting his father (Anton Trón) with his mother's (Hana Slivková) tacit support, and admiring Jolana (Iva Bittová) from the neighboring Romani hamlet — until Jolana responds. Faced with mistrust from both Jakub's and Jolana's families and venom from segments of their communities, Jakub pulls one more, grave prank that, he imagines, will help support the two teenagers as they take the train to the nearby city in order to live together.
Yet, not only does Jakub's prank — a theft of money from the post office — catch up with him, but it turns out that the two of them have conflicting dreams about life. Jakub has dreamed up an urban version of the stereotypical fantasy of a free-spirited Gypsy life with Jolana, whereas she has dreamed of a grounded life away from her troubled community and applies herself to achieve that. While Jakub goes from fantasy to prison to fantasy, Jolana gets a steady job and begins to realize that Jakub is no more her fantasy of a down-to-earth Gojo (non-Rom) than she is his "Gypsy woman".
As Jolana, back in the Romani hamlet, celebrates her wedding to her persistent Romani suitor Vojto (Ján Žigo) and Jakub returns to his parents for more idle dreams, a Romani woman, the Town Hall administrator Irena (Sally Salingová), and a Slovak man, the Town Hall maintenance guy and volunteer firefighter Ondro (Milan Kiš), a more mature couple from a subsidiary plot, are getting married too.
Director
Dušan Hanák (1938, Bratislava) graduated from the FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts) in Prague in 1965. He began with a series of shorts at the Koliba film studios in Bratislava. Several of them received awards, and so did his first feature film 322 (the code for cancer in medical records of diseases, 1969).
Hanák followed it with the still admired feature-length documentary Pictures of the Old World (Obrazy starého sveta, 1972), partly a meditation on what lies hidden beneath the concept of "an authentic life", a theme already addressed in 322. Although Hanák was treated with suspicion by the more repressive communist authorities that took over after the