Review of Panelstory or Birth of a Community (1979)
Seen in 2026.
I saw the 2025 digital restoration in a cinema.
A decade after Operation Danube, Czechoslovakia is under authoritarian communist control. Prague is getting a new suburb, all centrally planned. The first highrises stand tall and are already inhabited before the pedestrian routes to neighbourhood shops are even paved. In a pit of mud noisy with jackhammers, prefab blocks are continously added to more buildings. Underneath, a human drama reveals how little the new neighbours know or care about one another.
The dramatic writing is weak and so are the actors, with the sole exception of Antonín Vanha, an old man who looks and acts like a living caricature in the style of the finest Czech cartoons. That concave jawline is a beauty.
The real star here is the authentic environment of the unfinished suburb, shot in the jagged, jazzy style of Vera Chytilová. Because of the noise on set, a lot of the audio is unsynchronized, but the soundtrack makes up for it in the scoring department.
The strongest dramatic scene is the simplest: Jitka and Toníček at each other’s throats, the alienation and sexism of the suburban dystopia wearing them down. There was a lot of that sort of thing being made at the time, including Förort (1969) about a similar housing project that I’ve lived near.
Vanha’s character, on a visit from the countryside, represents the moral counterweight: The interlinked compassion of traditional rural societies everywhere. In a surprising coda that is perfect Chytilová, it is an immigrant from Mozambique, not a Czech patriot, who finally helps the old man in his quest to check on an old lady who looks lonely.