Pearls of the Deep (Perličky na dně)

“Generally anarchist and scaldingly farcical, the films look totalitarian life square in the eye, but they’re also living testaments to the era’s lovable, grungy Euro-slacker esprit…
all five films are compelling time capsules of defiance and love” — Village Voice

“Fascinating… lucid and hallucinatory” — Penelope Houston, The Spectator

“Effectively representing the ambition and freewheeling disregard which would come to mark the entirety of the Czech New Wave” — Jordan Cronk, Slant Magazine

“A turning point for the young New Wave… all of the film’s directors would immediately go on to make major, internationally recognized works” — Michael Koresky

“Hrabal’s darkly comic, allegorical stories made him an inspiration to the New Wave directors. In his writing, one can find elements that they all used in their films, notably his dry absurdist sense of humor mixed with moments of surrealism and his satiric jabs at the Communist government disguised as a critique of corrupt and inept power in general” — Pop Matters

“Such was the variety in aesthetic and narrative approaches, indicative of the breadth of directions the New Wave filmmakers would pursue overall, that Pearls of the Deep came to be regarded ipso facto as a manifesto of the Czechoslovak New Wave” — Senses of Cinema

“Uniformly excellent. Each director revels in the possibilities of Cinéma vérité-style filmmaking, making great use of evocative natural lighting and real-world locations… they display a rich and energetic interest in the lives of ordinary people, and all the joys and woes that come with them” — Czech Film Review

“Pearls in the Deep, was in a certain sense, the Manifesto of the New Wave. With the exception of Miloš Forman, who was at the time working on A Blonde in Love, all the major representatives of the movement took part in the film” — Josef Škvorecký