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Actor Ivan Palúch

documentary 2022

Documentary / Biographical

Slovakia, 2021, 52 min

Director: Martin Palúch

Script: Martin Palúch

Camera: Peter Kováč

Music: Ivan Palúch

Production: Peter Neveďal

Edit: Peter Harum

Sound: Michal Džadoň, Tomáš Kršiak

A television portrait dedicated to Ivan Palúch, an important figure in Slovak film acting, who touched the stars during his career, but after returning to Czechoslovakia he paid the price for harsh normalization restrictions. They forbade him to travel, to create freely and to advance artistically. Ivan Palúch is popular in Slovakia especially as a representative of cult film and television characters Prince Bajaj and Adam Šangala. However, most of the films in which he acted in the 1960s and later in the early 1970s are relatively unknown, partly because they were permanently withdrawn from distribution and locked away in an imaginary vault. Unlike his foreign colleagues, such as Annie Girardot, David Warner, Omar Sharif, Anna Karina or Anita Pallenberg, like many other artists working in socialism, he had to submit to a restrictive cultural policy, which had a direct impact on his further artistic career, personal life and professional development. It is also a memento that reflects the level of art bent under the rule of incompetent representatives of power and the impact of their interventions on the fate of a free-thinking individual.

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