All My Good Countrymen

1969 [CZECH]

Comedy / Drama

3
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 94% · 2 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 94% · 50 ratings
IMDb Rating 7.5/10 10 1204 1.2K

countryside politics socialism rural area post world war ii farming community

Plot summary

The lives of 7 friends in a small Czech town from 1945 to some time after 1958.

Director

Vojtech Jasný Photo
Vojtech Jasný

Top cast

Karel Augusta Photo
Karel Augusta as Joza Trna
Vladimír Mensík Photo
Vladimír Mensík as Jorka
Jirí Kodet Photo
Jirí Kodet as Fake policeman
Lubomír Kostelka Photo
Lubomír Kostelka as Man in pub
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
1.08 GB
988*720
Czech 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
2 hr 0 min
Seeds 2
2 GB
1482*1080
Czech 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
2 hr 0 min
Seeds 5

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by panspermia 6 / 10

Seems like a prequel to Satantango!

Satantango is my all-time favorite movie. It's about a small town and the dissolution of its collectivized farm after the end of communism. All My Good Countrymen (the title on my DVD, though listed on IMDb as All My Compatriots) is about a similar small town, but it's about the period of collectivization instead of de-collectivization. In All My Compatriots, there is a steady demoralization of the townspeople as the collectivization and politicization moves along from 1945 to 1958. If you follow that trajectory until the collapse of the Soviet Union, you get to the lethargic, soul-destroyed nadir from which Satantango begins. Even though All My Compatriots is about a Czech town, and Satantango takes place in Hungary, it's remarkable how similar the towns feel and how much the one movie feels like the continuation of the other.While Satantango is an unusually long movie (over 7 hours!), it felt like it moved along a lot faster than Compatriots. (Satantango isn't fast-paced by any means; but time goes by faster than in Compatriots because it manages to mesmerize in a way Compatriots does not.) Besides its slowness, Compatriots was also rather hard to follow. Nonetheless, Compatriots had a quirky quality I liked, and it's especially interesting as a movie made during the Prague Spring. Also, the town and landscape had a delightful Brueghel-like quality, and many of the faces made me feel like Fellini had managed to slip into Eastern Europe to shoot the close-ups.
Reviewed by mossgrymk 8 / 10

all my compatriots

A too long, too meandering and, in my opinion, too simplistic look at life in a Soviet Czechoslovakian village. The Communists, with the notable exception of the film's narrator, are pretty much all scumbags, while the anti Communists are all firmly stuck in either the Noble or Warmly Human Peasant tradition. However, despite these drawbacks, I found myself becoming increasingly sucked into director Vojtech Jasny's world until, by film's end, I didn't want to leave. Don't know why this was exactly although I suspect Jasny's poetic, luminous style, with its abundance of lovely music and cinematography and moments of genuine pathos, such as the suicide of a petty thief who cannot face incarceration , and the vagaries of fate when the wrong man is assassinated have a lot to do with it. Give it a B plus. PS...Is it just my imagination or is the opening shot of church spires rising above a rural landscape a lot like the opening shot of "Places In The Heart"? (i.e. I'd bet my pierogi that Robert Benton's seen this film).
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