On Thursday, October 5, the ambitious Czech film Úsvit opens in theaters. The whole idea of the film originated in an antiquarian bookshop, where the screenwriter found an old book on medicine.
The creators of Úsvit found inspiration in a more than a hundred-year-old forensic medicine textbook by Dr. František Hájek, which contains cases of so-called intersex people, i.e. people with both male and female genitalia.
Among them is the drama of a young carpenter who hanged himself in the workshop and during the autopsy it was found that he was also a woman. “We started to develop his story, but there are surprisingly many similar cases in the book,” notes the producer and director of the film Úsvit Matěj Chlupáček.
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For example, Czechoslovak “record woman” Zdena Koubková twice broke the world record in the 800-meter run in the mid-1930s. She was found to have male genitalia. The girl then underwent surgery and became Zdenek Koubek, a happy husband and a rugby player for Říčany.
This fact is confirmed by scientific studies from 2000, published for example by Time magazine. They state that hermaphrodite traits can be found in up to two percent of newborns, which roughly corresponds to the percentage of naturally red people in the population.
Dawn is the second feature film by director Matěj Chlupaček. Eliška Křenková, in the main role of a pregnant doctor, arrives in 1937, shortly before the war, with her husband, a factory director, to build the progressive town of Svit in the Tatras, modeled after Zlín. But their plans are disrupted by the discovery of the dead body of a newborn in the factory area. For the safety of her own child, Helena needs to find out what happened, but she encounters numerous obstacles, including her own prejudices…
“Czech textbook of forensic medicine from the 1920s. by Dr. František Hájek, which I found years ago in an antiquarian bookshop, showed me how differences between people were approached during the first republic,” says Miro Šifra, the screenwriter of the film Úsvit.
“It was taken as a biological fact – nature arranged it that way. Intersex people were among successful athletes, artists, craftsmen, and among poor village people. Some fates were tragic, but many were not ashamed of who they were even in public. It is a part of our history that we still ignore,” he adds.
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For many people, according to Šifra, gender is only a theoretical concept and an ideology that has arrived in recent years. “People have nothing to do, so they make up nonsense. Even Úsvit shows that the questions we are solving today regarding gender were solved by people a hundred years ago,” says the screenwriter behind the series Redl or Zrádci.
Watch the video in which the screenwriter of Úsvita describes the idea behind the creation of the film:
2023-10-04 15:11:00
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