A-E-I-O-U

Students of the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) were often capable of producing films that the post-1968 “normalisation-time” censors would lock up in the proverbial vault straight away; they were films that would only make it to audiences after the 1989 revolution. Examples of such films include the negativistic satire Evžen mezi námi (Eugene Among Us) made by FAMU student Petr Nýdrle in 1981, and the comedy A-E-I-O-U (AEIOU) which follows a similar theme and was created by the duo of Dušan Kukal and Martina Bezouška in 1979. It is a story of rural secondary school student Karel Sedláček (Ivan Luťanský) fleeing to Prague from an undesired marriage with his pregnant girlfriend (Vlasta Žehrová). In the capital, Karel tries in vain to cut it as a poet and eventually gladly swaps his failed revolt for the initially shunned career of a member of the police force somewhere in the backwoods near the country’s border. The medium-length film made it to the silver screen in 1991 together with another FAMU movie that had gone straight to the censor’s drawer: Nezvaný host (The Uninvited Guest, 1969) by Vlastimil Venclík.