Paper Heads

The prize-winning Paper Heads is a documentary reflection on the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia between World War Two and the revolution in 1989, interwoven with the personal experiences of the great Slovac director Hanak. For his essay about freedom and bondage, he used material that had been censored and never previously shown. Hanak shows how history repeats itself and he deliberately leaves an open ending, evoking the question of whether the Velvet Revolution really did mark the end of the totalitarian regime. We see the inability of civil servants to see reality, we see their existence in an absurd universe of their own. In addition, Hanak allows people to speak out for the first time whose lives were ruined by the trials in the fifties. The title refers to the satirical 1 May celebration in which people parade with paper masks that depict the Communist leaders.