The Children of Our Parents or How a Californian Surfer Learned to Love Czechoslovakia
Synopsis
The story of Czechoslovak minister Ladislav Feierabend and his family from the 1st Republic to the present, as told by his grandson.
American-born filmmaker Tom Feierabend surfs across continents and decades to retrace his Czech family’s destiny from the 1930’s to the present. Tom Feierabend’s grandfather, Dr. Ladislav Feierabend was swept into politics by President Beneš after the Munich Accords of 1938. When the Nazis occupied his country in 1939, he remained in the government but also became a prominent member of the resistance. Discovered by the Gestapo, Feierabend fled in a dramatic escape and joined Beneš’ government in exile in London. Most of his family was sent to concentration camp but miraculously survived. When the Communists seized power in 1948, Ladislav Feierabend again narrowly escaped arrest then fled into exile with his wife and children. The family ended up scattered across Europe and America.
Filmmaker Tom Feierabend revisits the stories he was told as a child, from the exaggerated glories of the Czechs during the 1st Republic to the horrors that ensued, surfing the frontier between myth and reality, between personal and political history. He takes us from the California beach where he grew up to the Malše river where his grandfather filmed his children in the 1930’s, and then moves forward – via Terezin, Dachau, London, Bretton Woods, and Washington – to present-day Prague. The film weaves together three generations of family films, excerpts from Ladislav Feierabend’s memoirs, historical and police archives, and personal testimonies from the Feierabend family as well as prominent Czechs, including Vaclav Havel, Meda Mládková and Milan Uhde. Ultimately, this deeply personal and strikingly original exploration of filmmaker Tom Feierabend’s own identity offers unusual insight into the identity of the Czech nation.