The Firemen’s Ball

Miloš Forman's last Czech film before his move to America, The Firemen's Ball (1967) is a small comic masterpiece that doubled, unmistakably, as political satire. Shot in colour with the town's actual residents, it earned an Academy Award nomination and was promptly “banned forever” by the Czechoslovak authorities after the Soviet crackdown of 1968.

The slender story — a volunteer fire brigade's gala descending into chaos as raffle prizes are pilfered and a beauty contest falls apart — becomes, in Forman's hands, a deadpan allegory of bureaucratic incompetence and collective self-deception under socialism. He directs with affectionate precision, letting the non-actors' faces and fumbling carry the humour, so that the film works equally as gentle human comedy and as pointed critique.

The political reading nearly sank it: offended functionaries took the firemen's bungling personally, and only the intervention of an Italian producer, Carlo Ponti, kept the production afloat. Banned at home, it became a touchstone of the Prague Spring generation. Brief, sly and bittersweet, The Firemen's Ball is a perfect miniature — a single disastrous evening standing in for an entire system's failures, told with a smile that never quite hides the sting. Its blend of affectionate comedy and quiet subversion has kept it a favourite of programmers, and it stands as Forman's farewell to the cinema of his homeland.