A Thousand-year-old Bee
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| The title theme, the honeybee, was featured in the opening voiceover, in Martin Pichanda's hobby, in his son Samuel's nickname, in the family's last name, in several scenes, and in a cumbrous special effect for whose execution the filmmakers received the infrequent, welcome permission and convertible currency from the communist authorities to travel to the West, the Bavaria Film studios in Munich. In the clip, the thousand-year-old ("millenial" is a common mistranslation) queen bee offers a hint to a drunken Samuel Pichanda (Štefan Kvietik) as he leaves the tavern where he was trying to drown his sorrow that his beloved's parents would not let her marry him. |
| The voiceover (Jozef Kroner) before the opening credits established the lot of the bees as a flattering parable of the Slovaks' past – they could have been more contentedly prosperous were it not for the cumulative effects of historical adversity: the fruit of their hardworking ancestors’ labor was periodically taken away from them, like honey from the bees, for a thousand years. |
| The consolatory message was among the properties that helped A Thousand-year-old Bee to become the second highest-grossing adult-oriented Slovak film in Slovakia in the 1980s and the third such Slovak film in the Czech-speaking lands. Kept in popular awareness by continual TV reruns, it received the highest rating (28%) in a nationally representative opinion poll on Slovak cinema two decades after its release. |
A review of A Thousand-year-old Bee.
Slovak cinema under communism.
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