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Family archives yield an intriguing documentary

Australian filmmaker finds a new story in old home movies

By Brooke Edge
For The Prague Post
February 21st, 2007 issue

Jan Přerovský/THE PRAGUE POST
Chobocky found unexpected parallels in her family's past and present.
“Australia was booming in the early ’50s. There were a lot of business opportunities, there wasn’t much in the way of government regulation, there was a lot of individual initiative going on everywhere, and people scrambling to cash in on the new frontier. And this is precisely what was happening in the Czech Republic after the fall of communism.”
So says John Kmenta, a Czech émigré and professor of economics interviewed in Capitalist Drive, a new documentary by Czech-Australian filmmaker Barbara Chobocky. The film tracks the economic and emotional survival of Chobocky’s relatives in Australia and the Czech Republic in the postwar era, and in the process finds a surprising commonality.
“For 40 years, politics and geography separated my family in Australia from my relatives in Prague,” Chobocky says in the first minutes of Capitalist Drive. “Yet, despite the gulf in history and in time, I’ve discovered some uncanny parallels between what my dad went through in Australia during the 1950s and the recent Czech experience, post-communism.”
In town last week to screen the film at Kino Světozor, Chobocky talked to The Prague Post about her personal history and the serendipitous discoveries that led to the making of the film.
Chobocky was born in Switzerland en route to Australia, soon after her parents fled Czechoslovakia in 1948. Growing up, she knew little about her European relatives beyond the fact that her parents would periodically send care packages of food and clothing to Czechoslovakia, and that her uncle Otakar was to be included in nightly prayers for his safe release from prison for harboring a British agent.
At 23, however, Chobocky found herself orphaned after her father suffered a fatal heart attack and her mother committed suicide. As a result, she grew closer to the Czech relatives she’d never met, visiting them numerous times during her 20s and 30s.
After graduating from film school in the mid-1970s, Chobocky started a production company to create documentaries focusing on social issues such as multiple sclerosis and challenges in child development. When one of her uncles uncovered some old 8mm home movies in the basement of his Prague house in the early 1990s, however, the course of her work changed.
Chobocky’s father had been an avid family filmmaker, capturing holidays and family vacations on celluloid. She’s still amazed that his home movies made it past communist censors to her uncle’s mailbox. “They must have gotten bored watching kids hopping around with kangaroos,” she says with a laugh.
Those 8mm movies eventually became the basis for two documentaries: Maria, an award-winning profile of her mother’s reaction to dislocation and relocation, and now Capitalist Drive. “I felt the need to make both of those because it was such a gift I’d been given,” Chobocky says. “I couldn’t let the films just sit there.”
Concerned that her relatives might have felt resentful about her family’s Western lifestyle while they were left behind, she was pleasantly surprised to get a very different reaction. “Seeing what it was like on the outside was like sending them a breath of breath of fresh air,” Chobocky says. And the films took on new meaning after the fall of communism, when her relatives began struggling with the adjustment to capitalism.
“When I saw my cousins going through it at the same age my father was when he moved to Australia, I thought, ‘Hey, there’s some resonance here,’ ” Chobocky says.
Capitalist Drive aired on Australian television in January, and there are tentative plans  for another Prague screening in May. (Further information about screenings is available online at www.filmaust.com.au.)
In telling the story of her immediate family’s adjustment to a new life in Australia, and her extended family’s experiences coping with the new Czech Republic’s capitalist economy, Chobocky has drawn a larger parallel between the emigrant experience and the efforts of former Iron Curtain countries to stay afloat today. While it’s an intensely personal film, it’s also a universal one. Many expats in Prague today, for instance, can trace their family’s roots back to when European ancestors boarded steamers for the supposedly gold-paved streets of the United States.
As Chobocky notes, “We all simply want to make our lives better.”

Brooke Edge can be reached at tempo@praguepost.com


Other articles in Tempo (21/02/2007):

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