The story of the new miniseries has a real basis – eXtra.cz

Voyo, the online video portal of TV Nova, today introduces the brand new miniseries Jitřní záře, which is loosely inspired by a true story that moved the Czech Republic several years ago. It tells of the struggle of alternative parents with the machinery of the state and examines where the rights of the individual end and where the authorities’ efforts to control human lives begin. Read about the case that inspired the filmmaker.

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Where are the boundaries between normal and alternative? Where does an individual’s freedom to decide what life (and according to which rules) he will lead begin and end? How should the state, or must, interfere with the rights of legal representatives? These are the questions that the series drawing from real stories opens up. What is alternative education and to what extent do parents have the opportunity to decide on the future of their children? Let’s take a look at the story that inspired the filmmakers and in their time the fate of this family followed the whole of the Czechia.

Midnight storm with a thorn in the eye of the authorities

In 2001, their parents gave birth to a baby girl in the small Šumava village of Šimanov. She was born at home during the big night storms and her parents decided to name her Midnight storm. But the strange name of the girl is only the result of her parents’ life so far. They do not recognize the traditional way of life, they want to live in the greatest possible isolation from the majority society and they wanted to do a lot of things “in their own way”. However their surroundings condemned them.

The disputes between the alternative couple and the majority society eventually resulted in a media-watched dispute. The authorities accused the parents of not officially registering the child and did not have them vaccinated. The little girl was even taken away from them for a while. Although her parents fought her back under relatively severe circumstances, the Midnight Storm as a name for the little girl never passed. In the end, they “agreed” with the state on the name of Eliška Gaius, and there was peace in a sensitive case for many years. Eliška Gaia herself remembers her childhood well at that time.

“I like to remember the moments when my mother and I played in the meadow, we knitted dandelion wreaths, cooked by the oven while my father and I were swimming in the sea, running along the beach, painting in the sand. Or when we went for a walk in the woods, he showed me where the mushrooms grow,“said the girl in interview for Deník in 2019. But then there were worse experiences that led the teenage girl to a relatively serious decision. At the age of fourteen, she decided to leave her unusual family and try to live a slightly less alternative life in Klokánek. She checked in there herself.

She longed for a normal life

“I went to school only until the middle of the second grade, since then I have had a home education, my mother is a teacher. I went to the test once a year. Then it was home education with a stay abroad, so I went to the exam once every two years. But as the siblings increased, there was no room for my mother to be able to teach me all the necessary subjects.“The young woman said in the above interview.” And I began to realize that it didn’t go on like this, that I wanted to do a job that would fulfill me, that I would enjoy. And that I need a school for that. I wanted to have classmates, peers, to experience what girls my age,“she added.

Eliška Gaia Today, she lives a normal life in a South Bohemian town, raising a partner with her partner – a cute little girl. He doesn’t want to go back too much to his past and apparently takes it as a closed matter. However, the social overlap of the case is huge and shows that not every story has only positive and negative characters. This is also probably the reason why Nova TV produced a similar story, even though it did not seem to have received permission from the actors in the case to use the real facts. Therefore, the Midnight Storm probably became the Morning Light.

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