AFTER THE VELVET REVOLUTION

After The Velvet Revolution is an intimate chronicle of a people and a country in transition.

The fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989 unleashed great hopes and expectations among Czechs and Slovaks for starting life anew, free from totalitarian rule. The documentary  provides a first-hand look at the reality of what happened in the first three years of democracy.

It follows people who speak about their lives under Communism and what they dream will happen.  We then see how reality measures against their dreams as lives unfold, from the end of communism in 1989 to the partition of Czechoslovakia in 1993. In the film we meet a family in South Bohemia that reclaims its land and farm confiscated by an agricultural cooperative, an underground rock star who becomes a member of parliament,  a woman who lived under the threat of arrest for her work on a banned newspaper,  a Slovakian psychologist who campaigns against the partition of the nation; and a former student leader of the revolution dedicated to publishing a small literary magazine.

The film aired on a few public television stations in 1994.   By then the demise of communism and the Soviet bloc was old news and American television programmers knew it would get meager rating points. The film became an orphan without distribution, save for a short run in the educational market.

Here is the first release of the full-length feature.