CADAL, the embassy of the Czech Republic, and the Arenales bookstore invite you to the free screening of the documentary Talk Havel: Are You Listening? (2024), directed by Petr Jančárek, tomorrow Wednesday at 7 PM at the bookstore’s location (Vallehermoso street, 110). Registration at this link.
The documentary offers an intimate and unprecedented portrait of the last three years of Václav Havel’s life, the renowned playwright, political dissident, and first president of the Czech Republic after the fall of communism.
In 2009, Havel himself invited Jančárek to film “the rest of his life,” granting him total creative freedom and trust. It is built from more than 200 hours of exclusive footage that shows both his public persona and his private life, documenting everything from his meetings with world political leaders to domestic and everyday moments at his country house.
The film captures an icon of global politics facing the end of his life without ever losing his characteristic sense of humor, his irony, and his deep concern for the future of democracy.
Havel gained prestige as an avant-garde playwright in parallel with his dissident and resistant activities against the communist regime of former Czechoslovakia. A co-signer of the famous Charter 77, which invoked Human Rights during the years of normalization following the crushed Prague Spring, he suffered several periods of detention and was a prisoner of conscience before becoming the undisputed leader of the popular protest movement against this gray Central European dictatorship, in a crumbling Soviet bloc. The Velvet Revolution of 1989, brought to success by Havel’s Civic Forum, led to a rapid and clean transition to democracy, whose first major milestone was the election of the Bohemian literate, on the penultimate day of the year, as president of the Republic.
