In a recent interview, Lee Adams mentioned he enjoys bumpkincore, a term he uses for films set in Czech villages. Curious about this subgenre, I decided to watch some of these Czech village films to see what makes them similar.

My Sweet Little Village (Vesničko má středisková, 1985)

Set in a tight-knit community (shock), this popular Czech movie follows the lives of characters in a sleepy Czech village. There’s the orphaned simpleton, the accident-prone doctor, the teenager in love with his teacher, and the wife who is having an affair.

This doesn’t sound like anything special, but I really enjoyed it. The archetypes are so familiar it seems like even the characters are in on the joke. And there were some great one-liners, like this one after the doctor crashes his car:

Truck driver: “You’ll come to a bad end, Doctor.”

Doctor: “We all will.”

Other things I spotted which might be deemed ‘typical’ of a Czech village film include: antiquated cars, rohlíky, employees falling asleep at work, brass bands, and houses in desperate need of paint.

Watching this film, I began to understand why so many young Czechs are so desperate to return to the tiny Czech village they grew up in. The film is a celebration of the simple life where nothing really changes, while Prague is presented as a soul-crushing land of depressing droids, motorways, and poorly built flats.

Nowhere in Moravia (Dira u Hanusovic, 2014)

‘Nowhere in Moravia’ is possibly the bleakest film I’ve ever seen. I can’t remember a single character smiling and there was very little narrative; people just seemed to be dying for various reasons. The rundown farmsteads reflected the general sense of depressed isolation. This is the portrait of village life often painted in British films: nothing happens, nothing improves, and you’ll waste your life if you stay there.

Like ‘My Sweet Little Village’, there were plenty of dry one-liners. For example:

German visitor: “Can you recommend someone reliable in the town.”

Local girl: “I doubt it.”

While the two films are very different, I noticed how Czech directors like to use the countryside as a character; it can either be parochial and jolly (My Sweet Little Village) or bleak and desperate (Nowhere in Moravia).

Berries 2 (Bobule 2, 2009)

Set in the vineyards of Moravia, Berries 2 follows the lives of two young men: one trying to make notoriously difficult wine, the other hiding from responsibility.

Berries is slicker than the first two films: it feels like the Czech version of ‘Meet The Parents’. There are many Czech village staples (leaky roofs, drunk village policemen, rusty old cars, lazy husbands, and annoyed wives), but, generally speaking, this is a far more glamorous version of Czech village life. A land where ‘Czech dreams’ come true – a place where you can (spoiler alert!) start with nothing and finish up making astonishingly good wine?

Summary

It would be wrong to label ‘Czech village films’ a subgenre because the differences between them are vast. But the movies do share some similarities, so next time you watch a film set in a Czech village, I’ve created a drinking game for you to try.

The ‘Czech village film’ drinking game

*Players participate at their own risk (I take no responsibility for diminished health and/or death)

• A character eats a rohlík (each player drinks a Czech shot)
• A character has an affair (each player drinks a glass of Moravian wine)
• A brass band plays (each player drinks a Czech beer until the music stops or a player passes out, whichever comes first)
• You see a rusty car (drink one Czech shot)
• A policeman is drunk (gargle one Czech shot while making a siren sound – ‘nee-nor-nee-nor’)
• A roof is leaking (straight-arm a Czech beer, i.e., drink the beer by holding it above your head with your arm completely straight)
• A character is fixing a roof (shotgun a Czech beer, i.e., stab the beer with a sharp instrument and drink from the hole)
• You see a metal yellow bus stop (drink one Czech shot ‘for the road’)
• A character complains about horrible ‘Praguers’ (drink a horrible foreign beer)
• A stupid ‘Praguer’ arrives in the village (drink a stupid foreign shot)  
• You see a bucket (mix a cocktail in a large bucket, drink through a straw, alternate between players until bucket is empty)
• You hear the word ‘carp’ (drink one Czech shot)
• You see a carp (drink one Czech beer)
• You see a carp and a character mentions the carp (drink one Czech beer + one Czech shot + one glass of Moravian wine)   
• Drink a Czech beer each time you see a character drinking a beer (Expert level!)

*First published in Milk & Honey, Česke Budějovice, Czech Republic