In July of 1973, 22-year-old lesbian Olga Hepnarová plowed her truck into a crowd of people on a Prague sidewalk, killing eight and seriously injuring 12, most of them elderly. It was not an accident: as Hepnarova detailed in letters she had sent to newspapers prior to her crime, she was committing the mass murder as an act of revenge against a society that had cruelly bullied her throughout her life, and she intended her crime to serve as a warning to other oppressors that the downtrodden may occasionally strike back. Utterly remorseless and entirely sane, Hepnarová was found guilty and hanged less than two years later, the last woman ever executed in Czechoslovakia. I, Olga Hepnarova, the award-winning debut of Czech writer-directors Tomáš Weinreb and Petr Kazda, revisits this tragedy, transforming it into one of the most unforgettable European films of recent years — an unsparing, haunting first-person portrait of loneliness and alienation. The extraordinary Michalina Olszanska (also starring as a ravenous singing mermaid in another 2017 CFF title, The Lure) makes Olga one of the angriest, most misanthropic main characters to emerge in some time, yet one always feels compassion and empathy for her, and her revulsion towards humanity. The film’s spare aesthetic and striking black-and-white cinematography evoke the European arthouse classics of the 1950s and 60s, but with a starkness that feels quite raw and unique. — Travis Crawford
Read programmer Travis Crawford’s interview with the directors and star: http://calvertjournal.com/
articles/show/5904/ i-olga-hepnarova-michalina- olszanska-tomas-weinreb-pe tr-kazda-czech-film Official Website: http://iolgahepnarova.com/
Cinedelphia Film Festival : April 13-29, 2017
http://www.cinedelphiafilmfestival .com/ PhilaMOCA
531 N. 12th Street
http://www.philamoca.org/
Source: I, OLGA HEPNAROVA – Tickets – PhilaMOCA – Philadelphia, PA – April 26th, 2017 | Ticketfly