Forty years ago, on 20th August 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to crush the rebellious Prague Spring. This evocative documentary captures the historic events of those heady days with an overpowering immediacy. The Soviet advance met with fierce, idealistic resistance. We join the hundreds of students as they man barricades constructed from overturned lorries to try to halt the advance. Sparsely armed, they fight fiercely, driven by a belief in their new and better socialism. But the deadening, inevitable weight of Soviet might soon stamps its boot across this hopeful Czech vision. Over 100 people died in the reprisals which followed, and tens of thousands fled their homes for the West.
This is the definitive story of the heady days before Soviet “normalisation” took hold. Filmmaker Jan Nemec assembled the film from his own material and other footage smuggled out of Prague. What began as an account of the liberation of a people, became a documentary of oppression; as the tanks moved in, the cameras simply continued rolling.
52 min 58 sec

Director: Jan Nemec

Concord Media

www.journeyman.tv/?lid=58711