We Have Never Been Modern – 28th Made in Prague Festival 2024

Writer: Miro Sifra

Director: Matej Chlupacek

Miro Sifra’s film, We Have Never Been Modern, showing as part of the 28th Made in Prague Festival 2024 in London, is interestingly ambitious. Sifra risks welding a period-specific piece about the success of a newly built factory in an as-yet-undeveloped part of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s with a reflection on prejudice. The prejudice in question is specific: it’s about the possible existence of hermaphrodism. As builders break new ground at the factory, a horrific discovery is made – the dead body of a newborn child. The real shock is that the baby in question has genitalia that is a mix of male and female. The early part of the film works as a whodunnit. Has the dead child been left by some saboteur as an attempt to discredit the new factory with the owner, who is shortly to visit? Surely none of the women workers in the factory can have delivered their own baby and then abandoned it on site without being observed?

Helena Hauptová, the young wife of the factory’s new director and herself heavily pregnant, feels impelled to investigate. She is, we are told, medically trained, but for some reason never qualified. Thoughtfully played by Eliska Krenková, Helena carries the weight of the film. Where her husband, Alois (Miroslav Köning), is invested in winning the approval of the authorities, Helena becomes increasingly critical of what she senses are underlying and sinister powers.

The film looks terrific thanks to cinematographer Martin Duba. Shots of the factory, the glorious countryside and the lavish interiors of Helena and Alois’s house are superb. But unfortunately Sifra feels bound to show us the pitiful corpse of the child. It’s both unbelievable – a newborn the size of a large badger – and the camera is too grossly focused on its genitalia. To drive home the message, we are shown illustrations from various contemporary medical text books about the condition.

Helena, determined to find the truth begins with false trails. She wonders at first whether the hermaphrodite child is the product of toxic chemicals the factory has dumped on the site. But then she learns from her reading about the condition, that hermaphrodism can be hereditary. Armed with this knowledge, and noting a young male worker’s absences, she quickly and improbably identifies Sasa, the young man in question, as the parent of the child. Finding an excuse to talk to him (and we note he’s given a conveniently gender-non-specific name), she finds the truth about the hermaphrodite birth. Although we may be keen to endorse such inclusive story-telling, credibility is rather stretched at this point.

The other rather unbelievable thing is Helena’s pregnancy. It is constantly referred to: running titles keep making reference to the precise day it is before she gives birth. We can surely expect at the least one of those emergency scenes of breaking waters? But her pregnancy is something of a MacGuffin. The film ends before anything happens.

There is an attractive section in which Sasa visits his rural home but director Matej Chlupacek’s overall pace is glacial and the original title, rendered in English as We Have Never Been Modern, is Úsvit – Dawn, in other words, which doesn’t really help to clarify anything.

We Have Never Been Modern is screening at the 28th Made in Prague Festival