"Then it was 1989, but we were not in Prague when the demonstration took place. We were on the rocks and we were coming back from the rocks and now we heard on the radio, so we went right away. I came right away... I didn't go home, I don't know if I got there right away or it was the next day, but we slept at FAMU afterwards. Because there was actually an awful lot of stuff going on, they were already secretly printing things and just... But I remember we slept there and people were on patrol. And there was one staircase, the main staircase, and there was a back staircase. And there were guards at both of them, that was guarded, I remember that. I slept there for about a week, in that school. And then one... we were terribly tired, but actually one didn't sleep at all."
"There was a denunciation against him and then there was a scene that I remember in detail. It was winter, it was before Christmas or maybe November. He was writing an English assignment with me, because I was going then, I got... it was a language school, it was called Nikos Beloyannis then, now it's Drtinova. And there was English from the third grade. So I started with English and my dad was good at languages, so he helped me. My brother wasn't at home, he was at some training. And the bell rang, and my mom answered the door, and then she came to get my dad. And there came... they opened... we had this hallway and there was already... for me then the feeling was that there were maybe eight of them. But they were maybe two or three, these guys in coats, and my mom took me into the kitchen with my grandmother. But I just saw that they immediately went without looking. That to me was like... they didn't say hello, they didn't get their shoes off and they went straight in. That's what we always had to do, or visits. And they'd go straight through the living room, where my dad had his study, where he kept all his... And now they started taking things out of the shelves and drawers. I was in the kitchen with my grandmother, and she was making me cocoa, and then my mom came to get me to go say goodbye to my dad. And all he had was this plastic bag, and I hugged him. I was always so... And he said he'd be back in a minute. But my mom was so sad."
Klára Formanová was born on 6 April 1965 in Prague. It was at a time when her whole family had been marked by the communist regime for a long time. For both of her grandfathers, Karel Stránský, a prominent Prague lawyer from a noble family, and Karel Balík, an elite pilot, the war and the communist regime meant imprisonment and harsh punishment of entire families. Even Klára‘s father, the writer Jiří Stránský, had already spent more than eight years in prison before she was born. He was arrested again when Klara was eight years old. It meant a lifetime of trauma for her. After graduating from high school, she had trouble getting into college and was only accepted to FAMU for the third time. At the end of her studies, she met her future husband, Petr Forman, the son of director Miloš Forman. Together they lived through the Velvet Revolution, traveled the world after it and eventually had three daughters. Klára took up screenwriting and while working on the subject of addicted women, she became more interested in this issue. Today (2023) she is working primarily on her father‘s unfinished scripts and looks forward to bringing them to fruition. At the time of filming, in 2023, she was living with her husband in Prague.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
