Servants

1980. Michael and Yuri are students in a religious seminar in totalitarian Czechoslovakia. The regime tightens its supervision of the Catholic Church, placing the staff members under constant threat of closure by the communist party. The two students have to choose: Take the easy way and collaborate with the regime's accomplices or become a target of brutal surveillance by the secret police. With spectacular cinematic skill, poetic language, and phenomenal black-and-white photography, Ivan Ostrochovský takes us back four decades. The result is a film noir in which two sets of faith, two opposite forces must confront one another a few years before the fall of the Iron Curtain.