In 1968, Czechoslovak critics voted a medieval epic the greatest Czech film ever made, and international audiences barely got the chance to see it. The film took nearly three years to shoot, in ice and snow, on a scale nobody in the Eastern Bloc was attempting.

MARKETA LAZAROVÁ (1967) follows two rival clans in 13th century Bohemia, the outlaw family of Kozlík and the landowner Lazar, dragged into conflict with a German king whose son they hold hostage. Mikoláš, one of Kozlík's sons, is sent to press Lazar into an alliance. When persuasion fails, he abducts Lazar's daughter Marketa on the eve of her vows to become a nun.

František Vláčil directed from Vladislav Vančura's novel, a text so dense with archaic Czech that generations of readers considered it unfilmable. Vláčil shot it anyway, in black and white, with a cast including Josef Kemr as Kozlík and Magda Vášáryová in the title role.

The result is brutal and hallucinatory, closer to Norse saga than costume drama. Faith, violence, and desire collide without any modern comfort softening the blow. It remains a landmark of Czechoslovak New Wave cinema, and one of the starkest visions of the medieval world ever put on film.