Country Teacher

The curse of the protagonist is to run from love and then run into it again in The Country Teacher, Bohdan Sláma’s final part in his trilogy about the human search for affection. Leaving behind a promising career and a lover in Prague, a young teacher takes off for the countryside to work in a village school. His own difficulties in accepting his sexual identity as a gay man are reinforced by the less-than-permitting social climate of the small community. He befriends a woman, a local widow who works at a farm. She soon wants to take the relationship further. But the teacher, unable to tell the truth about himself, secretly covets the widow’s 17-year old son. When the former lover from Prague suddenly shows up, he is finally forced to confront himself.

With naturalistic, long takes, Slámas artfully tells a story about unfulfilled love and sexual identity, and shoots a melancholic glance at the ironies of human existence.

Premiere Status
Nordic Premiere: Orig. title
Venkovský ucitel: Cast
Pavel Liska, Zuzana Bydzovska, Ladislav Sedivy, Marek Daniel: Producer
Karl Baumgartner, Thanassis Karathanos, Petr Oukropec, Pavel Stmad: Script
Bohdan SL: Cinematography
Divis Marek: Music
Vladimír Godár: Spoken language
Czech