Case for the New Hangman

Inspired by Gulliver’s Travels and infused with the spirit of Kafka, this darkly surrealist fantasia plunges Lemuel Gulliver through the looking glass into the alternate universe of Balnibarbi, where the paranoid residents live according to the absurdist laws of a shadowy regime and resistance is futile. Shuttling its hapless protagonist through a series of increasingly outlandish, tragicomic set pieces, the second and last of only two features made by Pavel Juracek—a renegade visionary whose career was effectively squashed by state censors—is among the Czechoslovak New Wave’s most daring and devastating commentaries on life under totalitarianism. New digital restoration courtesy of the Czech National Film Archive.