Jan Schejbal

“We kept doing antics like this. I remember that I had managed to arrange that we would have the Firemen's Ball, as they would let it be screened, with great deal of caution of course, after Forman had his breakthrough with Amadeus, so there were screenings, so in fact... If we wanted to screen it, I had to drive my old Škoda 100 all the way to Veselí nad Moravou, where Jirka Králík had been screening it at his film club. I had to bring it to Vysoké Mýto at night, to carry it to the cinema in the afternoon, load it in the projector, announce the film, screen the film, wait for Mr. Projectionist to rewind the film, put it in my Škoda 100 again and take it to Velké Meziříčí, where it would be screened on the next day. So using these almost partisan-like methods, we were spicing up our movie club's programme. So I would arrange things, as I knew, for example, that it was easy to come to Slovak Film Institute with a bottle, it was a subsidiary of the Czechoslovak Film Institute in fact. You would give this bottle to a doorman and borrow a copy of a film which had not been cleared to be screened in Bohemia. So I had been thinking about bringing some films by Němec, a film by Schorm, which had all been banned from being screened in our country, and we had this agreement, that, plain and simply, I would get on a bus in the morning, going from Hradec Králové to Bratislava, I would get to Bratislava, I would do this with my friends, what was needed to do, then in the afternoon I would go back on the same bus, I would get to Mýto, we would do a screening and on the next day, I would take the same road once again.”

“After I had been drafted, this so-called Polish crisis started in December. Jaruzelski declared martial law and we started drawing maps for our tanks to invade Poland. We slept with our boots on, waiting, in fact, for someone to raise the alarm, to whistle the signal we were going to war, and to put us in tanks, so we would go against our Polish brothers. Such a thing would start this mental struggle inside our head – what the hell would I do if I would be forced to aim a gun at those unarmed people. And that was quite intense, so that was the reason I got stomach ulcers, I would say, as I got them while serving in the army.”