Little Fatty

Terribly overweight but likeable teenager Jitka Pažoutová, who has picked up the nickname Little Fatty, is the protagonist of this 1973 family film with a sports theme. The film was born of the girls’ novel Metráček aneb Nemožně tlustá holka (Little Fatty or The Impossibly Fat Girl, 1969), penned by a popular author of books for adolescents, Stanislav Rudolf. The motion picture was directed by a seasoned creator of family films for children and young people, Josef Pinkava, who cast 16-year-old non-actor Markéta Světlíková in the lead role. The story tells how Jitka is finding it difficult to come to terms with her bodily proportions and clumsiness. She is regularly ridiculed by her peers, but the tables turn when she finds her forte in an athletic discipline in which her physical constitution works to her advantage: shot put. The once sneered at girl goes on to experience her first romantic affairs with boys: class outsider Libor (Jan Schmedka), fancied schoolmate Petr (Zdeněk Szamko) and athlete Honza (Vítězslav Jandák).