The Valley of the Bees

Medieval Bohemia. A nobleman gives his son to a monastery of the Teutonic order. Ondrej grows up there and the faith does not suit him; he runs away and returns to his father's castle. Armin, his closest friend at the monastery, comes after him. Armin regards the flight as betrayal and is determined to bring him back; his faith is unshakeable, and the unshakeability turns steadily into a threat. František Vláčil directs. The subject is not faith itself but what absolute faith does. Armin is not malicious; on the contrary he is entirely consistent, and the film draws its fear from that consistency. Vláčil made this directly after Marketa Lazarová with the same sets and crew; together they count as the most important medieval works in Czech cinema. The image is black and white and nearly documentary in texture; costume, stone, mud and the sea shore are filmed in detail and the period is nowhere romanticised. The bees of the title are the one open figure: the order of the hive built as an order in which the individual disappears and everyone does the same work. It was completed in Czechoslovakia in the year the Prague Spring was crushed and is open to the political reading of its moment. Who it is for: viewers who like Czech cinema and realistic treatments of the middle ages. Who it is not for: the pace is very slow, there is little dialogue, and the telling is deliberately cold.