1968: Hope

The first part of a documentary series returns to the Prague Spring of 1968 - to the period of so-called socialism with a human face in which there was a glimmer of hope that society as a whole would fully recover. The film, pieced together solely from period footage without commentary, chronologically recalls the key moments of an era when the process of democratization and revival was also accompanied by an extraordinary cultural boom. After only a few months, however, the post-January policies and planned economic reforms were stifled by the August invasion by the Warsaw Pact armies, which arrived to "rescue freedom from the planned counter-revolution".