The Shop on the High Street

This Academy Award-winning tale of ordinary lives disturbed and destroyed by war is one of the most internationally renowned films of the Czechoslovak New Wave.

The 1965 Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Language Film, The Shop on the High Street is a complex tale of ordinary lives disturbed and destroyed by war, one of the cornerstones of World Cinema and perhaps the most internationally renowned film of the Czechoslovak New Wave.

"Tóno" Brtko, a poor carpenter, is appointed by his Nazi brother-in-law to be "Aryan controller" of a Jewish widow’s haberdashery in German-occupied Slovakia in 1942. The widow, Rozalia, is nearly deaf, isolated and partially sighted, barely aware of the war or able to comprehend the danger in which she lives. Believing Tóno is simply her new assistant, the two develop a friendship that sees him maintaining the fiction as he attempts to protect her from the encroaching Nazi horror. Wonderfully written and performed, and with an extraordinary Zdeněk Liška score, the film moves effortlessly from drama to humour to tragedy becoming a devastating examination of how minor compromises can finally lead to complicity in the horrors of tyranny.