The film Ballad about the pilot will commemorate the fate of the airline RAF - Novinky.cz<

Before the war, Karel Balík was a famous pilot, but his life was complicated by the Nazis.He wanted to fight Hitler, so literally at the last minute he passed with his friends to Poland.The Soviets were imprisoned in Gulag, where he was submitted to the Czechoslovak prisoners by General Píka.Finally followed the desired journey to England, where he ranked among the top pilots.Flew with Churchill and took Benes to Moscow for Stalin to sign an allied contract.

After the war, he returned with other Czechoslovak pilots from Britain home, where not only his wife was waiting for him, who had been with women of other pilots in a concentration camp, but also a hard clash with the Communists.Before he convinced the woman he was interested in life, he was late to escape.

The film focuses on the events that took place after the war, at the end of the summer of 1945 and early 1946.According to David Švehlík, who portrayed the parcel, is a screenplay based on reality very impressive and intertwined with a historical drama with romance because it tells the moving story of the spouses who have stolen during the war and are hard to seek the way back to each other.”It is not a documentary processing of a particular historical event, but a strong human story.When the main character refuses to cooperate with the Russian Secret Service, it will also be reflected in his family life.He stands up as a hero and is punished for it, ”he explained.

The family knew about the strange circumstances of Balík's death, but the details were confirmed only by the documents discovered only a few years ago.They were stored in the military archive in the Invalidovna in Prague, but their finding and exploring them was complicated by the flood.After the archive has damaged the water, they waited frozen with thousands of other documents for restoration, and so the opportunity to look at them has been postponed indefinitely.

”Suddenly, just when I dealt with the story and search again, the phone rang and it turned out that another defrost contains the father's file.The wife could only read the truth about her father's fate.She died shortly after, ”recalls Jiří Stránský, adding that the Soviet secret service NKVD was behind Karel Balík's death, which decided to punish him for refusing to sign cooperation.Not only a pilot but fourteen other people died in an accident she organized.

The story of Stránský tells not only on the basis of family memories and archival materials, but also a testimony that he gained in 50.years as a prisoner in uranium mines.As it turned out, some of his fellow prisoners at that time were a pack of friends."I had a photo of my girl with me and they accidentally recognized her daughter's daughter in her," adds the writer.In the film she is played by his granddaughter Tonička Formanová.”We couldn't find anyone in the casting for a long time until we thought this solution.It came out.And not only plays her real grandmother, but she is even similar to her film mother Lucie Žáčková, ”reveals director Ján Sechlebský.

Jiří Dvořák will play the best friend of Karel Balík, whose prototype was also a real character."Strangely, his first shot down played on the day I have a birthday," he smiles at the question of whether something is linked to his role or pilots."And my dad and I were collecting aerial books," adds the actor, who is said to like uniforms, especially the aviation..

The director has already dealt with the fate of the RAF pilots when he made a documentary on the legendary fighter František Fajtl for the cycle of the Gen Cycle.And as he adds, he considers it happiness that he could know Fajtl through their nature: ”Even though they are referred to as heroes, they have never claimed to do so, nor did they feel so.They took the fight against the Germans as a matter of course.”

The film was made in a real environment with historical aircraft and will premiere next autumn.