The Butcher of Prague

Occupied Czechoslovakia, 1942. In the small village of Lidice a man kills his own son by accident during an argument and goes to prison, and being in prison is what will save his life. A letter sent from the same village is nothing more than a lie written to cover up an affair, and the Germans use that letter as their pretext. In June, Lidice is erased. Petr Nikolaev tells it by braiding three separate stories together. The international title points at Heydrich, but this is a film about the reprisal rather than the assassination: about who survived and what surviving cost them. Karel Roden leads it. What it depicts happened: the men were shot, the women and children deported, the village levelled.