‘Burning Bush’ Image Gallery
In 1968, Soviet tanks moved in to crush the “Prague Spring” experiment in democracy. In January 1969, Jan Palach, a 21-year-old student,set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square,searing the national conscience and setting a movement alight.Agnieszka Holland’s harrowing, courageous and utterly mesmerizing film, commissioned by European HBO and made in collaboration with members of the Palach family, traces the extreme price exacted behind the scenes from those who make history and on those closest to them. Across three epic chapters, the grey areas are filmed with scorching intensity, radiating both fury and hope against hope.This is the kind of fierce, historic document that never existed before, and that is arriving on schedule to feed the fires of a rising generation that is resisting a culture of lies, erosions and erasures of democracy, from Egypt to Oakland. –PS (Czech Republic, 2013, Episode 1, 84m; Episodes 2&3, 152m)