Menzel’s first colour film reads like a twist on a classic joke about three men: a retired artillery officer, a priest and a proprietor of a bathhouse go swimming in a pond and get interrupted by rain… Adapted from a novel by influential writer Vladislav Vančura, it was released in the middle of the Prague Spring and became one of the highest-grossing works of the Czech New Wave. A gentle pastoral idyll that recalls Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne, it features the director himself in the role of a village acrobat alongside Menzel regular, Rudolf Hrušínský.

Digital print courtesy of the National Film Archive in Prague.

Co-presented with The Melbourne Cinémathèque.