Servants

Local title
Teenrid
Original title
Služobníci
Director
Ivan Ostrochovský
Country
Slovakia, Romania, Czech Republic, Ireland
Year
2020
Programme
Current Waves

The year is 1980. Michal and Juraj are students at a theological seminary in totalitarian Czechoslovakia. Fearing the dissolution of their school, the tutors are moulding the seminarians into a shape satisfactory to the ruling Communist Party. Each of the young students must decide if he will give into the temptation and choose the easier way of collaborating with the regime, or if he will subject himself to draconian surveillance by the secret police.

Ostrochovský has created an austere, overwhelming black-and-white work in which he artfully contrasts the pallor of marble, plaster and faces with the darkness of the night and the black cassocks. A frosty film noir in which, just a few years before the collapse of the totalitarian system, the forces of history and the servants of two powers and two belief systems collide.

Director
Ivan Ostrochovský
Screenwriter
Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Marek Leščák, Ivan Ostrochovský
Cast
Samuel Skyva, Samuel Polakovič, Vlad Ivanov, Vladimír Strnisko, Milan Mikulčík
Producer
Ivan Ostrochovský, Albert Malinovský, Katarína Tomková
DoP
Juraj Chlpík
Editor
Jan Daňhel, Martin Malo, Maroš Šlapeta
Music
Miroslav Tóth, Cristian Lolea
Production
Punkchart films
Runtime
Language
Slovak
Subtitles
English

Programme presented by

Trailer