Milada

Milada Horáková, politician and human rights activist, fights against everything and everyone to defend her beliefs in communist Czechoslovakia.

"Is every woman with an opinion hysterical to you, sir?" this line sums up the film well, and the thinking of the time, a phrase still commonly used for women with difficult temperaments... A magnificent biography about a democratic politician who fought against the Nazis, being arrested, and post-war hanged by the communist party of Czechoslovakia under trumped up accusations of conspiracy and treason, for not agreeing to be in opposition to the government, unfair, revolting, beautiful, dramatic and exciting...

This was a well-scripted, decently acted docu-drama about a little known but incredibly courageous woman who held her own against the Nazis and then the Communists.

There were some issues on editing and timelines certainly, but I think we need to look at the bigger picture here rather than that which could have been done better production and direction-wise.

This was a woman of remarkable courage and bravery who had a set of core values to which we should all be inspired by, and emulate as best we can.

Having said that, despite integrity, honesty, decency, compassion and the highest of service being amongst the very best of values to which all of us should aspire ( as she did ), one questions as to why Milada did not have the wisdom to leave when she had the chances to do so. And which resulted in her evil execution and endangerment to her family. I know hindsight is a wonderful thing but I have the very strong instinct that Milada had the foresight that this might happen.

But this detracts in no way from a lady who was not just a true Czech hero, but one who is a hero to us all...

One of the best movies I have seen. Perfect actors performance. Very realistic and touching. Strong movie.

I was 9 years old when the communism finished in Czech and Slovakia. By seeing this movie I realized how lucky I was that it happened. Our whole family never involved in communist party so basically we could hardly effort anything. My aunty she could not study anything more than high school even she really wanted to do so. But as the father was not part of the communist group. She was not allowed. It was very strange times. Thanks God I was still very young when this night mare finished.

The first 20 minutes you see: The picture accidentally bounce presumably from the camera man losing grip. The story also barely allows 3 minutes for each significant to be digested before it cuts to another important moment, really poor editing. After say 20 minutes I was laughing at how we had skipped through 2 decades of her life scene by scene. Never really resting on one place or time.

I think it's a shame because she seems like a really interesting woman but if you can't rest on one place or time for a few minutes, the story has no emotional impact and is hard to follow. I would love to see this footage worked into a documentary-drama, where after each scene a historian gives further details. Alternatively they could have used some clever exposition and decided what part of her story they wanted to focus on. Anything but this 'style' of production'. Never seen such bad editing in my life.

I watched this movie because my heritage is Czech and I wanted to learn more about Czech history during the early years of communism. I have family that lives on the street that had been renamed after 1990 to honor this woman, so I wanted to learn more about her. I did know how roughly what her fate was before I started watching the movie. I was greatly disappointed. First, I did not understand why everyone spoke with a thick accent. The people would have spoken Czech and they surely did not have thick accents in their native language. So the accents were inappropriate under the circumstances and annoying and distracting.The movie seemed to be pretty faithful to what I imagine was period imagery in then-Czechoslovakia. However, the soul of the film was missing. It showed what happened but never ever WHY. I had to go to Wikipedia to read about Milada Horakova to learn something about her, and not even that answered why she was arrested both by the Germans and then the communists, when she was a very left-wing person herself. The only thing I will remember is that this woman did not care about her husband or her child, she repeatedly placed them in danger and was selfish enough to dump her whole family on her younger sister. At least that's the impression I got from the movie. I had absolutely no idea what exactly Milada did or said to end up so persecuted. I also had no idea, based on watching the movie, why notable personages of the day would have cared about her fate and appealed on her behalf. So all in all, the movie was a huge disappointment - I really don't know any more about Milada Horakova after watching the movie than I did before.