She Grazed Horses on Concrete (1982)

Original title

Pásla kone na betóne

Directed by

Štefan Uher

Genre

drama film, comedy film, romance film

Country

Czechoslovakia

Runtime

1h 18m

Rating

6.9 of 10 from 8 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

The film follows women navigating sexual freedom and abortion in a small Slovak town. It balances serious topics with humor and everyday life. The story uses local dialect for added comedy.

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What happens

She Grazed Horses on Concrete (Slovak: Pásla kone na betóne) is a 1982 Slovak-Czech comedy-drama film exploring themes of female sexual mores and abortion, holding out in society balanced with comedy and irony in proportions that instantly made it one of the biggest domestic blockbusters in Slovak cinema. A quarter of a century later, its DVD release sold out within weeks. The film, directed by the reputed Štefan Uher, made the women at its center stage stand for humankind as matter-of-factly as much of Central European filmmaking had been portraying men's worlds, the quiet turnaround never even became a talking point. It was also the first film that employed a regional variety of the language that would be naturally used where the story took place, which provided an additional layer of humor whose novelty had people rolling in the aisles. Its baffling title quotes a verse from a fresh folk song about a woman striving to accomplish impossible feats. Attempts to render it in English resulted in the film being shown and quoted under a range of titles that have included She Kept Crying for the Moon, She Kept Asking for the Moon, A Ticket to Heaven (also the erroneous A Ticket to the Heaven), and Concrete Pastures. The film was entered into the 13th Moscow International Film Festival where it won the Silver Prize. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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