The Children of Our Parents

Tom Feierabend is a California-based filmmaker who spent his youth surfing in the Pacific Ocean. He is also the grandson of politician Ladislav Feierabend whose memoirs published in the 1990s belonged among bestselling titles. Ladislav Feierabend was in the protectorate and exile governments; after 1948, he managed to flee the country and settled down in the United States. He was among the major proponents of non-socialist agriculture; in mid-1930s Czechoslovakia was a country with the highest number of farm collectives in the world. When he was little, Tom heard a lot about the idyllic life in pre-war Czechoslovakia. The ending sounds almost like a fairy tale; in the early 1990s, the filmmaker started a family in his grandfather's house in Prague and then decided to make a film about his roots that would blend big and small history. However, the film will definitely not be a fairy tale as Tom's insistence in interviewing his relatives rubs against their desire to keep the image of their famous ancestor unblemished. The perspective of an American intellectual on Czechoslovak history promises to offer unique and original insights. Fifteen years of research and shooting in police and history archives, interviews with emigrants as well as those who stayed behind, will offer a broad reflection of our relationship to recent history. Besides the Feierabend family, Meda Mládková, Milan Uhde and Pavel Žáček will be among those to appear in the film.