Iná láska (Another Love). 1985. Czechoslovakia. Directed by Dušan Trančík. Screenplay by Trančík, Jiří Křižan. With Maroš Kramár, György Cserhalmi, Zlata Adamovská. 35mm, courtesy Slovenský filmový ústav. In Slovak; English subtitles. 72 min.
After performing an unauthorized abortion, a doctor is given a suspended sentence and expelled from the profession. He personally returns the abortion fee to the woman at her rural Slovak village, and then sticks around to work as a logger, enduring the cruel taunts of the locals. Village life in normalization-era cinema was usually depicted in Edenic terms, full of lighthearted mischief, unlikely romances, and the dignity of peasant labor. In Dušan Trančík’s 1985 film, the Slovak village is gray, backward, and rigidly hierarchical. Its residents are superstitious moral charlatans, and it doesn’t take much for violence to explode from the shadows. Trančík, a prize-winning documentarian who repeatedly clashed with state censors, made this at the exhausted tail end of normalization. The Slovak Film Institute calls it a film that pushed social criticism to “perhaps the furthest possible limits.”