"A strange situation. I, a graduate of an elite school in the Soviet Union, havd no chance to get a position in my field, because all the people in leading positions were convinced that I wanted to take their place. But they found out that I was nobody, that I had no connections, so they messed with me. I was unemployed for eleven years, until 1991. During that time, I made five documentaries, that's all. Otherwise, I swept the streets, washed the stairs like a janitor, sold newspapers. When I shot something, it went into the vault. None of my films have ever been distributed. This is exactly the situation that was repeated in 1990. I was suspicious again because I had studied at a university in the Soviet Union. It was from the gutter to the puddle. I heard, 'Well, studying in Russia at the time wasn't just like that, who knew how he got there, how it was with him.' And this came from the comrades, who were scared for their positions during normalisation and shot one terrible ideological film after the other. Unbelievably strange."
"January and Palach have arrived. A unit magazine was published, there was a cross with a crown of thorns on the first page, and I wrote below that it is sad when a burning body shows us the way forward. And I rode like a ferret ... Everyone who prepared the magazine was suspended. They also downgraded an officer. Half a year after the occupation and such things have already been happening. They didn't know what to do with me. Whether to imprison me or not. Eventually, I was deployed to the guard section and sent to Doupovské vrchy, where I then guarded the ammunition depots for a month. In that month, I was so devastated that it could not be described in words. Imagine that for a month you live in a mode of two hours of service, two hours of standby, two hours of sleep. It takes a month. Then you no longer perceive anything, but you walk like a machine. Then I wasn't home for twelve months. The children went home to leave the school for two months and at Christmas, a week before Christmas I was on guard duty and was not allowed to leave for a year as punishment. "
"Dad had a somewhat turbulent life, it was like a carousel with him. He came from the small village of Dolní Loučka. My mother was from a family of people raised in a very humble spirit. Grandmother was a housewife, sometimes cleaning somewhere, her grandfather was Mrs. Lobkowicz's valet. My mother lived in Dolní Beřkovice, where her father took care of everything that happened around the noblewoman. They lived with her on at Jezeri for many years. My mother cried when she saw what Jezeri looks like today, because it used to be a beautiful, magnificent baroque castle. There she went eight kilometers to school and back every day. Her father soon died, she still had a brother, he died of diphtheria. She and two sisters remained, beautiful creatures. My mother and my father traveled together around the Czech homeland until we landed in Olomouc. It was more complicated with my dad. After graduating from high school, he worked as a laborer. During the war, he was with the government army, which was deployed in northern Italy against guerrilla groups. That was in 1944. I don't know how, but something extraordinary happened there. The whole company was deployed on night patrol. There were no Germans there. Usually the Germans commanded and the Czechs were deployed as normal soldiers. There were no German patrols that night, they agreed with the guerrillas and fled to them. All of them. There were simply empty barracks left. "
Suchanek was born in 1949 in Turnov. Due to a infavourable political profile, he was not accepted into college. He went to war shortly after Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Soviet army in 1968. When Jan Palach selfimmolated, he wrote about it in a department magazine, as a result of which he had problems for the next few years. He did ancillary work at the Barrandov Film Studio and in 1975 received an offer to study film directing in Moscow. He was sent there because none of the students wanted to travel to the Soviet Union, and he repeatedly unsuccessfully applied to FAMU. He graduated from the university, but after his return to Czechoslovakia there was no interest in his work because as a religious person, he often used religious motifs in his films. Eventually he became a member of the dissent, a a secret (flat seminars) university took place in his apartment in Olomouc. Priest Josef Zvěřina secretly taught theology to to the interested students. Together with his brother, they founded the amateur film studio Velehrad in 1985. They made films with Christian themes, which were secretly distributed among people on amateur copies. Since 1992 he has been teaching at the Department of Theory and History of Dramatic Arts at Palacky University in Olomouc.
