The Art of Dissent

"The Art of Dissent" celebrates the resilience and power of artistic engagement in Czechoslovakia before and after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. The documentary's main protagonists - Václav Havel, banned singer Marta Kubisová, and the underground rock group the Plastic People of the Universe (PPU) - became the most recognizable dissidents during the 1970-80s. Havel bridged the disparate clusters of individuals and fused the literary, musical, political, and philosophical nonviolent elements into a hybrid network that eventually toppled the totalitarian regime in 1989. The film speaks to our contemporary political malaise by underscoring the resolve and courage of dissidents who strove to re-build a battered civil society with artistry, tolerance, and truth. "The Art of Dissent" team presented the film to festivals with the excitement of first-time filmmakers and won five international film festival awards despite the pandemic. A unique co-production of NUtech Ventures at the University of Nebraska and Czech TV in Prague, "The Art of Dissent" combines rare archival footage with interviews with key dissidents filmed over three years in the Czech Republic, England, and the United States. Location interviewing began in Prague in 2017 with associate producer, Mariana Capková (a young politician) and Susan Pahlke (second camera). Thirty interviews were filmed over three years. Parallel with this, Le Sueur worked closely with Martin Bouda (Czech TV film archivist) and Alena Jirásek (Australian-based researcher and translator) to review, select, and edit the archival footage. Finding archival film and music of banned dissidents presented real challenges. How does one make a movie about "enemies of the state" not allowed to be filmed or photographed? Our quest brought us to the BBC and dozens of other clandestinely made films found in archives throughout Europe and America, as well as to several important private holdings in the Czech Republic. It took over two years to find and negotiate the rights for the music and films used in the movie. In this process, our team discovered forgotten film in a German archive of Shirley Bassey singing James Bond's "Goldfinger," of all songs, and "What Now My Love" in Prague just days before the invasion. From Josef Dlouhý we learned how the police confiscated his underground documentary about the Plastic People of the Universe and threatened the young filmmaker with prison if he did not permit state TV to turn his film into a