Our film for today is Sedmikrásky, or ‘Daisies’, directed by Věra Chytilová.

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1929, Vera initially attended college to study philosophy and architecture, but dropped out to work as a fashion model and then clapper girl at the Barrandov film studios in Prague. She sought recommendation from the studios to study film production but was denied. However, in 1957 she was accepted to study film studies at Famu, the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, the first woman to do so.

There, she was brought together with other directors such as Jiří Menzel and Jan Němec. They began to make films that satirized life under the Communist regime, and the black humour and anarchical spirit of their films became known as the Czech New Wave.

Described by Vera as a "philosophical documentary in the form of a farce", Daisies was banned by the government upon its release in 1966 until 1967. Her most controversial film, Daisies takes on a satirical tone as it follows two girls named Marie, who agree that since the world is spoiled, they will be spoiled too. They then embark on a series of mischievous pranks, leaving bills to older male suitors in humiliating dates, getting drunk at a dance hall and upstaging the main dancers, and parading on a dinner table as catwalk. Gluttonous and selfish, they use food and sex to fuel their hedonistic tendencies and satisfy their anarchic whims.

Vera emphasises the sardonic chaos of the film using effects such as coloured filters and non-fidelity sounds to disorient the viewer, with an almost non-existent structure to the film as the plot is disrupted by jump cuts. The female protagonists who in their childlike voices and playful behaviour resemble dolls run amok, culminate their bad behaviour in an orgy-like destruction of a food banquet set out for party officials, serving as antithesis of state ideology glorifying worker productivity and promising a bright utopian future for Communist heroes. As a chandelier falls on the girls, who try to reset the banquet with the broken plates, the film ends with a direct jab at authoritarian leaders, with a statement saying “to those who get upset only over a stomped-upon bed of lettuce” preceded by war footage.