Czech That Film Texas is bringing an award-winning thriller and community to Dallas

Czech culture goes far beyond kolaches and polka music, even if that’s the sum total of what most people ascribe to it. But even here in a state with significant Czech influence, it’s not every day you get to engage with anything authentically Czech, especially if you’re looking for something more stimulating than a road trip pit stop in West, Texas.

On Aug. 21, Czech That Film Texas is bringing a taste of authentic, contemporary Czech art to Dallas. The screening series, basically a quasi-roadshow programmed by filmmaker Jeffrey Brown, has been programming the latest and greatest in Czech cinema for cities across Texas for 14 years. This week’s screening, “Waves,” continues that trend with a dramatization of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of the former Czechoslovakia, when a Soviet coalition crossed the border and brought an end to the “Prague Spring,” a period of political liberalization in the country.

Brown is a native Texan who spent two decades living abroad in the Czech Republic before returning to the States. He serves as the animating force behind Czech That Film Texas, in partnership with Czech organizations like PolkaWorks and, in Dallas, the Vaclav Havel Czech School of Dallas and Sokol Dallas.

There is a rich history of filmmaking in Central Europe, and Czech cinema, in particular, was in the limelight in the 1960s when Czech films won the International Feature Film Oscar in 1965. But Brown’s passion isn’t just for Czech cinema as a historical body of work; he wants Czech That Film Texas to show people the films being made in the Czech Republic today. If that inspires them to seek out the classics, all the better.

“Waves,” written and directed by Jiří Mádl (best known, Brown says, as an actor in the Czech Republic), is about as strong an entry into the modern Czech film canon as you could ask for. One of the highest-grossing films in Czech history, it won six Czech Gold Lions (the Czech equivalent of the Academy Awards) and was shortlisted for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars.

“The film is about an emotional time in Czech history,” says Brown. “In the late ‘60s things were opening up, and there was what was called ‘Socialism with a human face,’ and the Czech Republic was thriving, and the… tanks rolled in, and that was the end. The party was over.”

“Waves” primarily focuses on the stories of Czechoslovak broadcasters and journalists who, Brown says, had driven many of the liberal cultural changes of the Prague Spring. He calls them “the last line of resistance when the tanks rolled in.”

Understanding that the invasion was such a troubling period in Czech history, Brown says they are positioning the screening as a “respectful remembrance of the events of August 21, 1968.”

On Aug. 20, “Waves” will play at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and at Violet Crown Cinema in Dallas on Aug. 21. This is not the first time Czech That Film Texas has hosted screenings in North Texas, but it is an attempt to better establish the series here and build an audience.

“We’re going to do a film, you know, once a quarter [or] a couple times a year,” he says. “We’re a small deal, but it’s very rich.”