The Firemen’s Ball

In this last film that Milos Forman made in Czechoslovakia, the country of his birth, the director takes a cheerful swipe at the notion that society can be held in check. This barrage of miscommunication, backstabbing and ineptitude was inspired by a time in Forman’s own life, when he and two fellow filmmakers secluded themselves in a village in Bohemia to work on a new film. Things weren’t going as well as they’d hoped, and after looking for some form of distraction they found themselves at the local volunteer firemen’s ball.

The succession of major and minor mishaps that they witnessed there was the inspiration for the satirical slapstick of The Firemen’s Ball. Shot in the same village with a cast of mostly local people, the film was a thorn in the side of the communist authorities (after the Prague Spring, the film was “banned forever”), but it was also Forman’s springboard to Hollywood.