The Ear

The Ear (original title Ucho), directed by Karel Kachyňa and based on a story by writer Jan Procházka, is a surveillance film following a tense, paranoid night in the life of a Communist Party official and his wife. Completed in 1969, immediately after the Soviet invasion and suppression of the Prague Spring, the film was banned by the Communist Party and shown only in closed screenings to studio management and party officials. It received its first public screening exactly twenty years later, following the 1989 Velvet Revolution; in 1990 it screened at the Cannes Film Festival in competition for the Palme d'Or and won the Golden Kingfisher award at the Plzeň Film Festival the same year. Who it's for: anyone curious about a surveillance film about a communist regime's own paranoia, which could only be shown publicly for the first time twenty years after it was made, following a change of regime. Who it's not for: viewers wanting a fast, action driven thriller, since the film focuses on psychological tension over a single night.