Fair Play

At the age of eighteen Anna has a big decision to make: is she to sacrifice her moral principles in favour of a career? An enthralling work on the major moral decisions faced by all those who didn't want to swim with the tide of real socialism.

It's 1983 in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic: runner Anna spends her time on the training ground. She lives together with her mother, her father emigrated to the West years ago, one of the reasons why Anna's mother has to work as a cleaner and her daughter can't study. The opportunity to start anew arises when she's offered a place at a sports centre that trains future Olympic athletes. Her coach has big plans for her and hands her a performance-enhancing substance, whilst Anna's mother also has Olympic plans; she wants Anna to take advantage of the opportunity to travel West, stay there and move in with her father. Anna however has fallen in love with Tomáš, she's not in touch with her father and also not overly keen on the substance she's been given, with its strange side-effects. Anna has difficult choices to make, and a lot more than doping is at stake.

FAIR PLAY is something of a rarity for contemporary Czech film; Andrea Sedláčková, who emigrated to France just before the start of the “Velvet Revolution”, takes an unusually authentic look at the eighties; fellow works tend to see events through rose-tinted glasses, thus romanticising the period, or reduce the social conflicts of the time to slapstick. Andrea Sedláčková however has created an enthralling, coherent film on the major moral dilemmas that arose in the bleak era of Czechoslovakia in the eighties. CF