"At that time, I was finishing my first professional film, called Our people in England, and it was about our Czech and Slovak students who lived in England on the basis of a student exchange. Ostrava did it, where we were also finishing cutting it. Sometime at eleven in the night we finished and I went to the hotel. And suddenly around midnight I heard a terrible noise. Tired, I got out of bed, looked out the window, there was a completely empty square, and suddenly a tank arrived, turned around, and left again. And I said – it is just a dream. This is from Bergman's film, I dream of Bergman's film. I went to sleep again. And in the morning I was woken up by a scary noise. I peeked out from the window again and there was a huge queue of people in front of the shops, people with flags, they all shouted, and I remembered the tank and I thought it was probably a war. But the mining trucks were driving on the top. I said to myself that if they drive, if they work, there is no war, that's fine. And suddenly they stopped. And I ran to the phone in horror - dead. I turned on the radio over the wire - dead. And I peeked down the hall and there a maid ran and shouted, 'Girls hide! The Poles are here and they are raping girls, hide!' So, I hid, all scared that we were connected to Poland, that Ostrava was connected to it. Then I went down the stairs and there stood a Russian officer in uniform, wanting to see my papers. I didn't show him anything and I went out. I felt sick and woke up in the hospital, from which I escaped and returned to Prague by the first train. Nobody knew anything in Ostrava."
"Before that, FAMU sent me to Moscow. I somehow forgot about it and I went to Sweden and then to England for almost a year. So, to the West. Then I returned in 1968, I wanted to extend it there, but I had to have a recommendation from the school, meaning from Otakar Vávra, that he would recommend it to me. However, Vávra did not give me the recommendation because I had a hostile attitude to the regime. So, I stayed there illegally as an emigrant. In the meantime, however, the regime changed here, Dubček joined and suddenly the previous conditions were not valid and I was able to extend my stay. And when I returned, Vávra was very welcoming and nice to me, it was still June 1968. He said that my theoretical diploma was excellent and that it would be the script and my film that it was amazing. But I already blew the movie off. Well, it's finished, the graduate, but at the end three shots are missing, about which no one knew, but I know it, it would be better if they were there. In the meantime, the tanks came again, and I saw after maybe fourteen days, the tanks were still there, I saw Vávra with the badge of the Communist Party, and when my friend and I were watching him, he went to the Soviet embassy. So, there was a situation that the regime was breaking fast here in the late 1960s. At first it was a bit loose here, at the end of 1968 it got tough and then Dubček came on again and the release and then the tanks came again and it got tougher a lot again. And my main professor, who was supposed to judge me, was the one, that his approval or disapproval of my film depended on the regime, that he liked it or didn't like it, and I didn't understand it at all."
"Then I got to the doctor through nepotism, through those friends. He was a big Bolshevik, a communist, Dr. Docent Janík, but at the same time he said that as soon as there is a sudden change in the society, a number of intelligent people will have some neurotic disorder, and that these people need to be calmed in some way and gradually put into the changed society. He took all my pills. The neurosis is a sign that one does not want to adapt. Someone doesn't want to adapt and it won't do anything to them, and somebody else doesn't want to adapt and they have stomach pains, headaches, the neurotic disorders." - "And you had it and you probably didn't even have to play it much?" - "I didn't have to, I had it and it's hard, it's hard to tell what it's from. I had a heartbeat for example. "
"Then I joined the underground, which was devastating for me because I'm not like that. But a man back than was the one who smelled those hippies in the '60s, but the company didn't suit me." - "And what didn't suit you? " - "The ones I met, I will say it in an ugly way, they seemed stupid to me. First of all. Secondly, a person is from a certain background, he has a certain upbringing, and for example people took me to a concert of Plastics (The plastic people of universe) and I didn't like it. I didn't like the music. I didn't like speaking rudely. A friend wrote a story about learning to speak rudely to survive in that company. You were kind of playing with it, but you wanted something posher, something cleaner. It wasn't that clean. Or a quick change of partners. I never knew who was dating whom. So, there were definitely very capable, brilliant people there. And these types surrounded me, and I was not very good at it. I didn't like to sit in a pub full of smoke for six hours a day and drink a beer. "
"Who was your spiritual master, the priest?" - "He was a Franciscan, a secret provincial of the Franciscan order back then. His name was Kubíček. I had an appointment with him once, I didn't find him at home, which was weird, he was reliable, I ran to his old friend from prison, I found her crying and she said that they had all been arrested. I asked her to write it to me, she wrote by hand whom and when they had ever arrested. We had a hard time typing it at my acquaintance's typewriter. When it was the tenth copy, I called someone from the Charter, I gave it to him and exactly what I wrote, Medek said in the evening on the Voice of America. Word by word. Many years passed, I went to film in Rome, where I met the staff of Vatican Radio and Father Koláček began to explain to me that he just had a meeting with John Paul II at the time. Mr. Medek from Vienna called him to say that they had arrested the Franciscans, so he told John Paul II what was going on with us, and he picked up the phone and called Husák. They were released in a month. It's just the proof of how they worked back then. I had no idea how it got to Medek, and I had no idea that there was Koláček. I had no idea that the pope could call Husak. On one hand, we knew the people, the lady and the people around the Charter trusted me, that it was a guaranteed message and not a fictional message. The connection, how it worked, was terribly complicated."
"Just before the Charter, I met a friend on the street and she took me to an apartment lecture. I thought it would be boring and snobbery, but I had nothing to do so I went there. I sat somewhere in the corner and looked opulently at the ceiling, as if I didn't belong there, that all of them there were such intellectuals. An old gentleman was talking there, and during the hour he was talking, he put me on my feet. Everything I asked myself, about FAMU and so on, in philosophy, what is true and so on, so he explained it to me. When we crawled back through the house hallway, I asked who it was and they said that Patočka. It didn't tell me anything, but at home I found out that there were several Patočka´s articles and even one of his books in my father's library. I fell in love with him. I never talked to him, but I haven't missed any of his lectures since then. I kept everything in mind, and when, after my signature, he was in the Charter as a spokesperson, it was a guarantee for me that it was good. Even though the text was nice, the Patočka was a guarantee."
"Nobody knew anything in Ostrava. The train seemed to me like a train from the First World War, the last train departed from the direction of Ostrava - Prague. The people must have gone crazy, and there were people with duvets upstairs on the cars. It was completely packed. I could make up that hens and goats were also taken there, but almost yes. As the train passed through Moravia, you could hear heavy planes and someone shouted, 'They're bombing Prague, they're bombing us!' And the train began to scream in terror, and the moms pushed the children under the seats. Someone had a transistor receiver close to his ear and said that there were barricades in Prague and fighting on barricades there. They will bomb. This is the end of socialism. When we arrived in Prague, somewhere in Kbely, there was no bombing, but I was scared to death. "
"With the Charter, it was like this. I was woken up by the radio in the morning, I heard rumors from 1950s about some enemies. They named various people there, Pavel Kohout and others, and it made me very angry. It was a reading from the Rudé Právo newspapers, where the article The Wreckers and the Soldiers was published. So, I learned from the Rudé Právo newspapers that there was a Charter. And because I was moving around Prague where there was some samizdat circulating all the times - letters; for example, a letter from Václav Havel to President Husák, so among those samizdats, my friends also let me read the text where the first signatories were. It was so intelligently and cleverly written and it was true. I looked at the signatures and there was my acquaintance among them with whom I went to the mountains once. I rang at her place and she arranged it through the gentleman she lived with. I received a card with the text that I agree with Charter 77, I wrote my name, address and signature and I gave it to him. This made me a signatory to the Charter."
Angelika Hanauerová was born on October 3, 1943 in Prague into the family of architect Karel Hanauer. After graduating from eleven-year high school, she worked as an auxiliary worker in Fasádostav and then as a flapper in Barrandov. In 1962 she was accepted to FAMU to study a direction of a feature film, which she graduated from in November 1968 with Professor Otakar Vávra. In the meantime, she studied in England and Sweden. She experienced the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 in Ostrava, where she was editing her first professional film and collapsed nervously in a panicked atmosphere. Until 1971, she made documentaries for short films, Army Film and ČST (Czechoslovak television). She refused to adapt to the requirements of normalization, without official status as a freelancer, she was in the position of a “parasite,” which was a crime. After a stay in a psychiatric hospital in Bohnice in 1973, she received a retrospective proof that she had a state-recognized “free profession” since her graduation in 1968. From 1973 to 1982, she was able to make a living by writing for children for the Panorama publishing house; she shot children’s feature series and fairy tales for ČST Bratislava. In the 1970s, she married an American guy, whom she met in Prague. She wanted to live in the USA, where she went to be with him, but they got divorced. In 1977, she signed Charter 77, took part in Jan Patočka’s housing lectures, moved among people from the underground church and dissent, but she did not want to be a part of the underground. In 1982, she refused without hesitation to cooperate with the StB, which offered her a passport and a ticket to the USA and financial support for providing information about Czech exiles in the USA as a part of the “Asanace” project. From 1982 to 1991, she worked as an assistant nurse for the elderly people at the MNV Prague 5, distributed newspapers and, after being fired for political reasons, found a job as an assistant educator for deaf children in a special kindergarten. After the 1990 revolution, she returned to her profession as a director and made her first post-revolutionary documentary movie, About Jan Patočka. She then made more than 40 documentaries for Czech Television.
