Wednesday | October 6, 1999 9:00 pm

The Shop on Main Street
(Obchod na korze)

Screening on Film

Directed by Jan Kadar.
With Jozef Kroner, Ida Kaminska, Hana Slivkova.
Czechoslovakia, 1965, 35mm, black & white, 128 min.
Czech with English dubbing.

This film stands not only as one of the most accomplished films that Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos would create, but also as one of the most highly regarded Eastern European films of the 1960s. When a carpenter becomes the "Aryan comptroller" of a button shop owned by an elderly Jewish woman in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, his allegiances are tested. The film’s tragic subject is carefully combined with a comic tone, and the result is this oft-praised winner of the 1965 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.