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Shame, self-reproach and secret communications fill this deeply disturbing story of two students in 80s Czechoslovakia

As if in a succession of scenes from a starkly remembered bad dream, this deeply disturbing film in haunting monochrome, from director Ivan Ostrochovský and co-writers Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Marek Lescák, tells the story of two students in a Catholic seminary in early-80s Czechoslovakia, part of the (real life) Pacem in Terris organisation, a collaborationist body through which the church submitted to state control in return for the right to (notional) existence.

Juraj (Samuel Skyva) and Michal (Samuel Polakovič) are fresh-faced boys who arrive at the seminary to find themselves in an austere haunted house of shame, reeking of paranoia, exhaustion and self-reproach. Dissident young priests are secretly communicating with the Vatican and with Radio Free Europe and the priestly authorities have neither the courage to endorse this defiance nor the ruthlessness to suppress it,...

Film Movement president Michael Rosenberg, Loco Films head of sales Arnaud Godard announce acquisitions.

Film Movement has acquired US rights to Philipp Yuryev’s Venice Giornate degli Autori Director’s Award winner The Whaler Boy and Ivan Ostrochovsky’s Berlinale selection Servants (exclusive).

Both films are in the pipeline for 2021 theatrical releases followed by roll-out on home entertainment and digital platforms.

The Whaler Boy stars Vladimir Onokhov as Leshka, a 15-year-old whale hunter in the north eastern region of Russia who contemplates a perilous voyage across the on the Bering Strait to meet a girl he encounters on a webcam site.

The success of Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida and Cold War has revealed, among arthouse audiences, a heretofore unimagined ravenous hunger for Eastern Bloc period dramas of Catholic conviction and political compulsion, shot in academy ratio and shimmery digital grayscale. Thus Servants, a hushed drama about underground activism, secret police, fear and trembling at a seminary in the former Czechoslovakia.

Two young seminarians, Juraj (Samuel Skyva) and Michal (Samuel Polakovic), arrive in Bratislava to further their studies. The seminary’s dean (Vladimir Strnisko) has maintained this sanctified space, with its almost medieval-brutalist bare walls, by accommodating himself and his institution to the state-affiliated Catholic movement Pacem in Terris, which in reality really was the Czechoslovak communist government’s primary check on the activity of the church post-Prague Spring. But the sounds of Radio Free Europe penetrate the cloistered environment, and students and teachers distribute fiery pamphlets. Juraj is drawn to an...

“You have to understand, we’re not here to be happy,” a so-called spiritual adviser counsels one of his wards in a Catholic seminary — a rare moment of truth in the shadowy morass of governmental and theological manipulation that consumes Ivan Ostrochovský’s impressively icy Iron Curtain noir “Servants.” Though happiness has never seemed the objective of priesthood so much as a kind of affectless peace, both are in short supply in a film that jitters and shivers with anti-authoritarian sentiment beneath its serene monochrome aesthetic. Form and feeling are at odds throughout this steadily transfixing tale of young seminarians standing up to the Communist Party’s infiltration of their school in the former Czechoslovakia.

All hard, clipped lines and spectral quietude, from performances to production design, this is a period piece with a dystopian bent. It may be set in 1980, though as its opaquely fragmented storytelling and hyper-meticulous mise-en-scène combine to disorienting effect,...

The 70th Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 20 – March 1) unveiled its Encounters program today, featuring the premieres of new works by Tim Sutton and Romanian director Cristi Puiu.

Also screening is Josephine Decker’s Shirley with Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg, marking the film’s international premiere after its upcoming Sundance bow, and Gunda by Victor Kossakovsky, whose last pic was the 2018 Venice doc Aquarela.

Encounters is a newly-created competitive section at the Berlin festival that looks to highlight “new voices in cinema and to give more room to diverse narrative and documentary forms.” A three-member jury will choose the winners for Best Film, Best Director and a Special Jury Award.

“As a result of passionate research, the 15 titles chosen for Encounters present the vitality of cinema in all of its forms. Each film presents a different way of interpreting the cinematic story: autobiographical, intimate, political,...