Sekal Has to Die

The years of the occupation, in a small Moravian village. Jura Baran, a blacksmith counted an outsider because he is a Protestant, takes shelter there. The village lives in fear of an informer named Ivan Sekal, who is rewarded by the Germans with confiscated farms and uses his power without limit. The villagers want to hand the job of killing Sekal to the stranger, and that is where the film sets its real question: whose conscience carries the thing a community would not do itself. Vladimír Michálek directed, from a screenplay by Jiří Křižan. Olaf Lubaszenko plays Baran and Bogusław Linda plays Sekal. It won ten Czech Lion awards in 1998 and was sent as the Czech entry for the Oscars. In the record the character’s name is corrupted, with a stray syllable stuck to the front of the sentence.