May Tale

In March 2016, the National Film Archive returned the restored poetic silent film The May Fairy Tale by Karel Anton, based on the impressionistic novel by Vilém Mrštík, to Czech distribution after almost ninety years. This version was first screened on 6 July 2015 at the Karlovy Vary Municipal Theatre as part of the 50th Karlovy Vary Film Festival. IFF with a newly composed live musical accompaniment by the trio Incredible. Subsequently, the film was shown at the Bonn Silent Film Festival and on 26.8.2015 at the summer cinema at the Žižkov Freight Station. The film, which loosely develops in ten parts the love stories of four sisters of an old forester, Helenka, Gusta, Albína and Anna, is one of the most important works of Czech silent cinema. Under the pseudonym Petr Dolan, Jiří Voskovec made his debut as Ríša and Jarmila Horáková, a twenty-two-year-old talented actress of the National Theatre in Prague, made her debut as Gusta. After the sudden death of Ferdinand Kaňkovský (representing the forester) in August 1926, his role was completed by Rudolf Žák, whom the director tried to hide as much as possible. The future famous illustrator of children's books Helena Zmatlíková also played a small child role. Jan Žák, a Czech-American, planned to release the film in the USA under the title Four Sisters, but failed due to the advent of sound film. In 1960, Bohumil Veselý used the working footage from the filming in the documentary How We Used to Film. In 1940, the director Otakar Vávra worked on the idea a second time, starring Natasha Gollová and Svatopluk Beneš. - In the 1950s, the missing parts of two prints with German intertitles were added to the surviving incomplete negative. Bohumil Veselý inserted Czech intertitles in this copy in a modern language adaptation. In 2005, a new copy was copied from the original materials in the Bonton Zlín studios, into which the corrected Czech intertitles were inserted according to the original subtitle from the censorship file.