A new energy flowed in the Czechoslovakia after Alexander Dubcek became its leader in 1968. The statesman championed reforms that expanded freedom of speech, protection of press rights and economic programs prioritizing working class people without radically disrupting the nation’s communist framework. The Soviet Union loathed the plan and sought to suppress it with force. Their military intervention, in which the government and its Warsaw Pact allies sent in troops to end that period now known as the Prague Spring.
In Waves, the Czech Republic’s submission for the 2025 Oscars, Jirí Mádl crafts a propulsive thriller about a team of journalists doggedly pursuing the truth in the months before the Prague Spring and the days of the Soviet Union’s aggressive occupation. The film is inspired by true events, which Mádl came across while researching how the International News Office of Czechoslovak Radio operated in the ’60s. At the time,…