Little Crusader

In Czechoslovakia, between 1946 and 1971, the characters of two very different fairy tales interacted and enriched each other: on the one hand, the filmmakers of the Czechoslovak New Wave who, through poetic, committed and ambitious cinema, fought against the Soviet yoke with subtle irony; and, on the other, the writer Jan Procházka, who in 1968 added his voice to the popular outcry of the Prague Spring.

The story takes place in Czechoslovakia in 1987. The father has defected to England and the mother and her son are planning to leave the country to reunite with him. The film is told through the eyes of the fourteen year old boy, his rankled look without the veneer of experience and initiation in one day. Autobiographical.

A professor reunites with an old friend who inspires him to return to Czechoslovakia for the first time since he emigrated years ago.

A wealthy middle-aged man at the airport witnesses a tiny incident involving an unknown, perhaps Arab, young man and airport staff. After the young man is confronted directly at the airport toilets, he feels himself subject to an indefinable but increasingly serious sense of danger. The fear of the evil that had, as it were, encircled the man since then, gradually becomes an obsession. The urgent desire to see the evil, to confront it and destroy it.

The father falls into a coma. The mother and son silently concentrate all their powers. They meekly accept the diagnosis but resist the verdict. Yet they reject an open conflict because the life thread is so taut that conflict could inadvertently break it.

What is love? Two young men have found themselves out of rhythm in their relationship as issues they haven’t vocalized begin to boil over in unexpected ways one night. ROCK HARD is a story of what happens when partners don’t communicate, and serves as a lessons for billions of viewers worldwide in the ways we have to participate in love rather than seeing it as effortless.