Yahoo News “We’ve Been Struggling to Get This Story Onscreen for 10 Years”: ‘THR Presents’ Q&A With the Director of ‘Brothers’
If you pitched the plot of Brothers, the Czech Republic’s official Oscar submission for best international film, as a screenplay, you’d get back studio notes calling it “unbelievable” and “over-the-top.”
Two brothers — Josef and Radek Mašín, sons of a legendary anti-Nazi resistance fighter Josef Mašín — take up arms against the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, carrying out targeting killings and acts of sabotage. When they get pinned in by the authorities, they shoot their way out and take off on a death-defying escape to West Berlin, crossing Czechoslovakia and East Germany, while pursued by Red Army soldiers and 20,000 East German police in the biggest manhunt in Cold War history. But the story, told by director Tomáš Mašín in Brothers is all true.
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“It’s the utmost poignant and inspiring story,” says Mašín, who is a distant relative to the Mašín brothers, in a THR Presents panel powered by Vision Media. “My great-great grandfather was from the same line as General Josef Mašín, but there were like 12 siblings, so it’s really complicated,” he says. “We’ve been struggling to get this story on screen, to get it financed and bring it to the audience, for almost 10 years.”
Despite their seeming heroics, in the Czech Republic, the story of the Mašín brothers remains divisively controversial. Many still consider the brothers to be criminals and murderers — they killed six people as they fought their way out of the country — labels slapped on them by the former communist regime, which tried and executed other members of the Mašín resistance “gang.”
“There is still the very widespread narrative, going back to the communist time, that depicts them as villains,” says Mašín. “But the second reason, I think their story is still so controversial, and so widely discussed in the Czech Republic, is that there were few actually [resistance fighters] and the Mašín brothers, and their friend, Milan, they survived [Czechs] honor those people who died during the resistance but, ironically, will won’t honor those who survived, because they remind us that 90 percent of the nation that was afraid to actively resist brutal Soviet and communist power.”
Adapted by Marek Epstein from the nonfiction book Gauntlet by Josef Mašín’s daughter Barbara, Brothers stars Oskar Hes and Jan Nedbal as Josef and Radek and Tatiana Dyková as the brothers’ mother, Zdena Mašínová. Yellow Affair is selling Brothers worldwide.
Despite boasting a fraction of the budget of a Hollywood production, Brothers has an epic feel, particularly the cross-country manhunt and siege shootout climax, involving, Mašín says, “10 pieces of period military equipment, including a tank, countless weapons, countless gunshots, even heavy machine gunfire. Which we did in two days!”
In total, the production shot over 37 days, on 70 locations. “Let’s just say it was a struggle,” says Mašín.
But, he says, it was worth it.
“The main theme of the film, one of the key messages, is that freedom has to be fought for no matter what the personal sacrifice,” he says. “When someone shoots at you, you have to shoot back. [This] is the message the brothers’ father gave them, to remember that defending your country and your people’s freedom is the chief obligation of every conscious Czech, or more generally, every conscious person. This is their father’s legacy, and I hope also the legacy that comes across after seeing this movie.”
This edition of THR Presents is sponsored by Dada Films.
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