Jana Rabová

It is 1961 and an Albanian student (Nik Xhelilaj) of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, together with a group of Czech students, is shooting his graduate movie on a motorcycle factory, in the small market-town of Český Šternberk, in then Czechoslovakia. Coming from a country that is completely isolated from the rest of Europe, he is fascinated by the lifestyle, society and "erotic exuberance" of the Czech golden youth, yet feeling strong links with his family in his homeland. He falls in love with a married woman (Anna Geislerová), the wife of a police superintendent (Paolo Buglioni) and is insecure about his future.

Three friends - Tomás, Hubert and Jozka - are boys growing up in a little town. Tomás lives with his aunt Apolena and uncle Václav. Tomás is a boy with lots of ideas that often end up getting him into trouble not only with his teachers and aunt, but with the other inhabitants of the town as well. He has a crush on his schoolmate Blanka and for her sake he decides to try to get the prize for the best pupil in the school.

The dreaded Italian mafioso, Marian Labuda, will also be convinced. Mafioso Carmello was guilty of the principles of his organization when he tried to fool the boss and earned a death sentence. The convict runs away from the killer through Vienna to Prague, which his Austrian colleague in crime recommended as a safe hiding place. None of them knows that the Czechs learned so much tricks under real socialism that a seasoned Italian professional is not enough to watch.

The film was based on the novel "Milión" by Karel Štorkán. The book and the film depict the events surrounding the great construction disaster in Prague in 1928, in which 46 construction workers died. The disaster thrilled the entire republic at the time, yet was never fully explained. The filmmakers focus on the story of Ing. Vondrák, the designer of the construction.

A marquee stands on a sprawling Prague housing estate and is home to two young bricklayers, who have all sorts of life experiences waiting for them in the city. Around the two rural bricklayers absorbed by the big city, the entertainment is more than a little embarrassing, toothless, revealing that at the height of normalisation, even the jolly genre of drama fared poorly, and any satirical allusions were especially undesirable. With no sense of humorous exaggeration and no wittily punctuated plots, the story unfolds, showing how the characters, living in a marquee standing on a sprawling estate, face all the pitfalls of the "big world"...