On VideoOn VideoKarel Kachyna is a Czech master filmmaker who has been active in film production since 1951. He was born in 1924.
THE EAR (1969) which many consider his best early work was instantly shelved for twenty years after the 'Prague Spring" was crushed by Soviet tanks. This master work was not seen until 1990.
THE COW (KRAVA) premiered in New York in 1995 at the Joseph Papp Public Theater to excellent reviews.
SYNOPSIS: THE COW 86mins/color/35mm
A cycle of life begins again, in a remote turn of the century Eastern European farm which is inexorably tied to the land and its animals. A passionate triumph of life and love over adversity.
Adam (RADEK HOLUB) is a young farmer. As a child, fleeing a bleak reality of his mother's life as a prostitute, he tumbles from a mountain and is mentally injured. Years later, his mother dying, so Adam sells their only cow to pay for medicine. Rosa (ALENA MIHULOVA), a beautiful young maid, fleeing the sexual exploitation of a wealthy butcher, climbs to the top of the mountain and dares to become part of Adam's remote but beautiful world.
REVIEWS
Larry Worth, NEW YORK POST
" If Ingmar Bergman had directed "forrest Gump" it might have come out something like THE COW. But it's a far more honest and infinitely more rewarding rendering of "simple is as simple does."
Godfrey Cheshire, NEW YORK PRESS:THE COW proves the pleasures of modest perfectly inflected lyricism... a triumph of simple feeling over strident sensationalism... its muted, folkloric charms are quite a tonic amid the current on rush of overblown and gratingly ponderous foreign films.
John Anderson **** NEW YORK NEWSDAY" The COW is a timeless and powerful fable, a story of such utter simplicity and visual poetry that it becomes its own archetype...a comet's tail of emotion.
Michael Wilmington CHICAGO READER"A burning sharp fable of the cycles of life, death and marriage... the acting is fierce and relentless. THE COW is such a luminous and vigorous work.... obviously a culminating work in a career we've largely missed. But it's also one of the most striking, moving and memorial new foreign language films of the year.
Kevin Thomas: LA TIMES "THE COW is a beautiful, poignant and altogether captivating Czech love story."
Steven Holden NEW YORK TIMES "THE COW delivers a message that is simple and utterly convincing...Beautifully photographed."