Saturday, 14 February 2026 at 9 pm
Intimate Lighting
Starring: Vera Kresadlová, Karel Blazek, Jaroslava Stedra, Zdenek Bezusek, Miroslav Cvrk
Director: Ivan Passer Screenplay: Jaroslav Papousek, Ivan Passer, Václav Sasek
Czechoslovakia • 1965 • 71' • fiction • drama
After a decade, cellist Peter decides to visit his native village and reconnect with his childhood friend Bambas, a local music teacher who mostly performs at funerals. Peter arrives with his fiancée, and the two spend the day with Bambas and his family…
Intimate Lighting, the debut feature by Ivan Passer, is considered one of the key works of the Golden Age of Czechoslovak cinema in the 1960s.
Before directing his own film, Passer collaborated on screenplays for Miloš Forman, alongside Forman and Jaroslav Papoušek. It was Papoušek who offered him the script as an opportunity for his first feature. Coming from a bourgeois background deemed undesirable in the socialist context, Passer accepted the offer with little expectation that anything would come of it. His earlier short film, A Boring Afternoon, which won an award at Locarno, had been cut from the final version of the omnibus Pearls of the Deep, a project that launched the successful debuts of many directors of his generation.
To his own surprise, however, Intimate Lighting was ultimately granted funding and brought to life.