Agnieszka Holland sets sights on Czech hero

Oscar-nominated Polish film director Agnieszka Holland has returned to her 1960 student stomping-grounds in Prague to shoot a series on Czech anti-communist martyr Jan Palach. The "Burning Bush" TV series centres on the student who in 1969 set himself on fire in protest against the Soviet-led occupation of his country a year earlier. The occupation by Warsaw Pact forces brought an end to the reformist 'Prague Spring' movement in then-communist Czechoslovakia. "At that time, I got very involved in the student movement in Prague, and I even ended up in prison," the 63-year-old Holland, who graduated from the film school of Prague's Academy of Performing Arts, said in perfect Czech. "The events affected me deeply, and they had a considerable influence on my world view," said the director, whose Holocaust drama "In Darkness" has been nominated for an Oscar in the best foreign film category this year. Jan Palach, a 20-year-old philosophy student, the son of a confectioner and a shop assistant in the small town of Vsetaty about 30 kilometres (20 miles) northeast of Prague, poured petrol on himself, then set himself on fire in Prague city centre on January 16, 1969. His aim was to wake up Czechs who had virtually given up their struggle for freedom in the wake of the bloody invasion of his country in August 1968. Palach suffered burns to 85 percent of his body and died three days later. His sacrifice triggered two more politically-motivated acts of self-immolation later that year -- student Jan Zajic followed suit on February 25 and worker Evzen Plocek on April 4. Slovak actress Tatiana Pauhofova, who will play the key role of an attorney battling the communists' efforts to tarnish Palach's memory, has poured scorn on the lack of knowledge about Palach's legacy in her homeland. "Several people of my generation in Slovakia asked me: Who's this Palach?" she said, expressing shock. The Czech Republic and Slovakia formed Czechoslovakia until they split peacefully in 1993. "I have learnt that in February 1969, Vilem Novy, a communist member of parliament, published an absurd theory saying Palach's act was masterminded by Western secret services," says Stepan Hulik, the 28-year-old screenwriter for "Burning Bush". Novy claimed that Palach had believed he was using a harmless substance delivering a so-called "cold fire," but his friends secretly replaced it with petrol to kill him and spark "anti-Soviet hysteria". The theory was regularly repeated by the Czechoslovak press until the fall of communism in the bloodless Velvet Revolution of 1989. "Palach's mother filed a lawsuit against Novy and she was looking for an attorney to defend her case against the totalitarian regime," said Hulik. "Hence, the main character of the film is the courageous young attorney Dagmar Buresova, who became justice minister after 1989," he added. "Jan Palach himself appears only twice in the film -- at the very beginning, there's the self-immolation scene, and then we can see him disfigured by fire," Holland reveals. The shooting of the three-part film produced by the HBO channel is scheduled to start on March 1. The film will be broadcast next year. "I feel moved by Palach's unselfish act of love, and at the same time I'm terrified by what he did. I find this tension between the two feelings very attractive," said Hulik. For the young screenwriter, Palach's act is not only a matter of the past but rather raises the timeless "question about the extent to which we should fight things that we detest." "The film is a challenge. As if destiny came knocking on my door to invite me to return to what I once found important," said Holland, who also praised her young team. "My generation was affected by the years of communism, by the submission to the Soviet Union," she said. "But the young ones are free of this resentment, and they will watch the story out of curiosity to see the truth about their identity."