Slavic and Eurasian Film Series: Citizen Havel Is Rolling Barrels (2009)

In 1974, the then banned playwright Václav Havel found a job as a brewery hand so that he would not be accused of social parasitism. He ended up rolling barrels and filtering beer for nearly a year even though he drove a Mercedes to work. His new experiences, described in the film by Arnošt Šerkézy, his boxer buddy from the lager cellar, started him on a new way of writing. He dashed off his first autobiographical - and arguably his best - play, Audience, in a single night. The film relates stories of the genesis, the productions and the cultural reverberations of Havel’s influential one-act.

All movies are free and have English subtitles