
Self (archive footage)

Self (archive footage)

Self (archive footage)

In 1954, recently crowned Queen Elizabeth II and HRH the Duke of Edinburgh embarked on a two month tour of Australia. It involved some 10,000 miles of travel by air and 4,000 miles by land and sea. The couple visited every state in the nation, and turned up at all sorts of events, from tennis at Kooyong to steel mills in Newcastle to woodchopping at Wagga to the Flying Doctor Service Service at Broken Hill. The film production arm of the federal government - the Film Division of the News and Information Bureau of the Department of the Interior - decided to cover the tour in 35mm colour film, sending the footage to England for processing and editing. Six weeks after the tour ended, the film was finished and became the first feature-length Australian film shot and financed by Australians in colour to be given a theatrical release.

In its "velvet revolution" of 1989, the people of Czechoslovakia toppled its communist dictatorship and embraced democracy and capitalism. By January 1993, the country had peacefully split in two. In the early 1990s, thousands of American college graduates began flocking to Prague, where they could postpone entering the "real world," and live cheaply in a beautiful undiscovered European city. Throughout that decade more and more tourists crossed the statue-lined Charles Bridge in search of old world beauty previously hidden by communist isolation. But what of the people who cross the Charles Bridge on their way to work every morning? Who are the Czechs? What is their history? What is their future? My Prague Spring is an award-winning film that vividly humanizes a resilient people who have survived a tumultuous history. In the spring of 1990, a Czech-American filmmaker spent four months living with his Czech relatives, and opened an intimate window into an uncertain world.

Weiss’s classic B&W agitprop short made after his escape to London just ahead of the Nazis. He carried with him three reels of material for his unrealized film ‘Dvacet Let Svobody’ (‘Twenty Years of Freedom’) i.e. 20 years of the existence of independent Czechoslovakia from its 1918 founding to 1938 when the Munich Agreement dissolved it. In English with poetic narration written by C. Day-Lewis (father of Daniel Day-Lewis).

Planned by Britain’s MI6 and then executed by America’s C.I.A., the coup d’état which follows will destroy Iran’s last democracy, and relations between Iran and the West until the present day. Most shocking of all, the truth about Her Majesty’s role will be hidden from the Queen herself, and even the all-powerful Shah who will be used by Britain and American to replace Iran’s last democratic Prime Minister. The coup will lead to political upheaval all over the Middle East for decades to come, eventually resulting in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 which will end the reign of the Shah, and British and American influence in Iran, inspiring countless other Islamist revolutions around the world.