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A Czech Christmas (2005)

A Czech Christmas tells the story of Daniela and her sister Zuzana, who is eight years younger. They are two women who fled Prague in 1968 and came to the Netherlands to get away from the Communist regime. While you would think that such an action would strengthen their sisterly bond, in this case it drove the two sisters further apart. But every year, they celebrate, with their two families in Holland, Christmas the Czech way, because, as Daniela puts it: 'Even the Communists couldn't eradicate Christmas'.

Simonka de Jong, daughter of Zuzana and director of the film, wonders how it is possible that her mother and her aunt are so very different, and where the tension originates that is always palpable between the two sisters. Daniela, Simonka's aunt, is a woman of feeling and has always been more rebellious against their parents, whereas the more rational Zuzana always behaved as was expected of her. She married a Dutchman and has developed into a successful woman in the Netherlands. She works as a rheumatologist in a hospital and has recently defended her doctoral thesis. Together with her husband she lives in a magnificent house on an Amsterdam canal. The artistic Daniela, who has a Czech husband, is more of a dreamer, has no job and harks back to the past.
Simonka decides to take the two sisters back in time. She accompanies them to Prague, where they grew up, and together they visit the father's grave. They also listen to tapes made after the war, on which their father talked about his time in the concentration camp Auschwitz. Especially their father's expectations and behaviour turns out to have played a major part in the relationship between the two sisters.
The mutual tensions reach a high point when Zuzana shows her sister round in the recently acquired summer house in the Czech countryside which is yet to be refurnished. Daniela, who wants to cherish her childhood memories, cannot get over the fact that it is her rich, Westernised younger sister who returns to their Czech native soil.
Back in Holland preparations for the approaching Christmas Day are under way, but the confrontation with the past has pushed any Christmas feeling further into the background than ever.
Czech Christmas is a documentary about fraught family relations and how the past always leaves its mark on the present.

The film plan for Czech Christmas was developed within the Documentary Workshop organised by the Dutch Cultural Broadcasting Fund in collaboration with the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam and was awarded the 'Dutch Cultural Broadcasting Fund Documentary Prize 2003'.

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