Requiem for a Maiden

Because of an official mistake, a fourteen year old girl is placed in an institution for the mentally ill instead of a foster home. Inside she meets with harsh treatment; the order is in the hands of staff who act as they please and nobody inspects it. She makes a desperate attempt to escape. The film does not turn the events into a spectacle of horror; it tells how the institution works and how the mistake is never put right. The account set out from a real case and from a book. It takes place in Czechoslovakia in the nineteen eighties and puts the absence of oversight at its centre. The girl herself is at no point presented as ill. Anna Geislerova plays the lead in Filip Renc’s ninety nine minute Czech film, completed in 1992.