Jay Clifton won a copy of The Valley Of The Bees in our recent competition. Jay has kindly sent in some words on the prize he received:
Valley Of The Bees has an austere beauty about it, especially in its stark black-and-white photography, and a lot of its fascination for me comes from the minimalist performances of the two central actors playing the hero (Petr Cepek) and his antagonist (Jan Kacer) - though this is a sophisticated film which seems to argue against simple interpretations of good and evil, which are the foundation of the fourteenth-century monastic order the hero is given to as a young boy by his tyrannical father. These devout men, The Order of the Teutonic Knights, will also slaughter their fellow man without flinching if they feel it is Divine will they do so (and in historic reality, they did so, in the name of converting heathens).
In the character of Armin (Jan Kacer), who tracks down the hero or anti-hero of the story Ondrej when he deserts the Order's castle to return to his family's village, the film presents a character who in the name of his genuinely-held Christian belief is capable of both being a Good Samaritan (he save Ondrej's life in an attack by vagabonds - Ondrej rewards him by knocking him unconscious with a rock and stealing his horse) and a brutal killer, or as he would see it himself, an Angel of Death.
It seems almost certain to me that the director was making a subtle comparison between the ruthless true believers of the Crusader era and the hard-hearted but (in many cases, at least) honest men of the Communist Party ruling his country (the Prague Spring rebellion and attempt to democratise socialism by Czech dissidents was in Spring 1968, only a year after this film was made). But whether one is interested in this historical context or not, the story itself says something valid about the paradox between ideals and reality, heavenly absolutism and earthly compromise, that resound beyond the era the film was made in. Well worth viewing. JC
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