Burning Bush

Lest they forget.

The abbreviation of Agnieszka Holland’s Burning Bush from a Czech TV miniseries to a feature film over three hours long is a compelling experience. The film starts with Prague student Jan Palach burning himself alive in 1969 to protest the Russian suppression of Czechoslovakia. It proceeds to detail the Czechs’ support for the brave young nationalist and their government’s attempts to smother his effect, for fear of more Russian intrusion. 

The tyranny tries to change the dead hero into an unstable dupe. When a government official slanders the dead boy his mother and a student movement leader sue him. Their lawyer’s initial reluctance to take on the case proves justifiable when she’s haunted by cops, her doctor husband is pressured out if his hospital job and her long-term trusted partner betrays her to save his activist student daughter from persecution.

  The film shows what massive pressure a tyrannical state can put on its citizens. A history teacher can be promoted to principal. A nurse can be blackmailed into lying. A journalist can be pressured to refuse to testify. The judge can be threatened with banishment to North Moravia. A cemetery manager can be ordered to remove the hero’s grave and incinerate the corpse so no trace of him is left. 

Except his name and his story, which 20 years later remained a force behind Czechoslovakia’s rip away from Russia. 

The film has a happy ending but it’s in the epilogue titles, not in the narrative. The plot leaves the tyranny transcendent and justice denied. As the sued politician explains, in politics the truth is what best suits the needs of the people, i.e., the government. So even the taped recording of the politician’s slanders doesn’t sway the compromised judge from accepting his lies in the hearing.

This is an important film. It speaks to young Czechs and Slovaks who may not know their nations’ past. That’s a valuable history lesson throughout the world. Perhaps it is especially significant now that Vladimir Putin is rattling the Russian chains again, trying to lure the Ukraine back into the fold and tossing dissidents like Pussy Riot and his political rivals into jail. This is a timely warning.