THE APPLE GAME

Chytilová returns to the big screen with THE APPLE GAME after eight years of enforced silence – though the impositions are brief, the film is still censored. At the time of the normalisation, she devoted herself passionately, playfully and with decided radicality to her subject: the struggle of women for recognition and equal footing, this time in the delivery room. In this film, which got its start as a commissioned work about the baby boom, the children struggle in agony to get out of their mothers, while the fathers are useless, when they are not absent entirely. Surrounded by the chaos of birth, the talented nurse Anna falls in love with Dr. John – played by New Wave wunderkind Jiří Menzel – who is himself attempting to make a splash professionally and otherwise, albeit utterly overwhelmed by the process…