Underplayed Gems

She Grazed Horses on Concrete (1982)

She Grazed Horses on Concrete poster
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
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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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)

More like this

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