Waves

Prague at the end of the sixties. Tomas has to look after his brother; there is no family and money is needed. He takes a job as a technician at Czechoslovak Radio. The department he joins is International Life, where journalists work on news from abroad and push the edge of the censorship a little further every day. Milan Weiner, who heads it, knows what he is doing. Tomas is squeezed by the security service; his brother is threatened and information is wanted from him. In August 1968 the tanks come into the city and the radio is left as the only voice. Jiri Madl wrote and directed. Vojtech Vodochodsky, Tatiana Pauhofova, Stanislav Majer and Ondrej Stupka are in the cast. It is a Czech production. The film rests on the events of 1967 and 1968, the Prague Spring and the August invasion; the radio's broadcast during the occupation is a real event. It was the highest earning domestic production at the Czech box office in 2024 and reached more than a million viewers in Czechia and Slovakia. Czechia submitted it for the international feature award at the Oscars and it made the shortlist of fifteen. The matter it treats is who the news belongs to; for the people at the radio the question is not politics but getting the right sentence on air. The narrative also carries a personal line through the two brothers. The film takes the technical detail inside the studio seriously; the tapes, the desks and the broadcast room are built correctly. The narrative does not leave the security service one dimensional and shows how the pressure worked. The ending closes with real archive sound. Its limit is context; the names are dense for anyone unfamiliar with the politics of the period, and it starts slowly. Who it is for: viewers who like historical drama and stories about the freedom of the press. Who it is not for: it needs context, it is long, and the ending bitter.