I learned about this movie 55 years ago from my girlfriend at that time and future wife in my native Czechoslovakia. She was working at the chemistry laboratory of Slovensky Film (Slovak Hollywood). As an employee she has had the access to movies before their distribution for general public. The communist party under the First Secretary Alexander Dubcek started reform movement which did not end well by Soviet and Warsaw Pact's invasion into the country that year. The movie director Leopold Lahola lived abroad but was rehabilitated and allowed to come back year before. He has died only 50 years old when the movie was still in the production.
The movie came nicely packed from Czechia. It has English subtitles and now I could see it with my current American wife during our weekly movie time. Czechoslovakia divided herself in 1993, but countries of Czechia and Slovakia still attain rich mutual relations. The movie in the country at that time still under the communist regime was considered to be a confession of a man who left his motherland, which opened her arms again for him to come back home. The environment and scenes are mostly from abroad and the movie is completely apolitical. After many years seeing it again, however, I offer you an alternative understanding and inspiration.
Only few people at that time in Czechoslovakia would think or talk about something like reincarnation, that was for Indians far away. Now when I have a lot of metaphysical studies behind me, I see the movie differently. The story of a man needing to sleep all winter in order to be able to live again advertised as a fantasy is there for many of us to think about a cyclical nature of our existence. Jonas Rebenda must always start as a child, then going through wild need to enjoy living until completely exhausted and tired he finally finds his Kalimagdora again. He is making the same mistakes again with only few adjustments and remembers only fragments from previous cycle of his life.
Dear traveler, you who are here, aren't we perhaps doing the same again and again? There are many people on this planet who seriously study the issue of a cyclical existence of independent soul and consciousness returning into the same environment. They want to improve and then master their understanding of a human nature. Jonas Rebenda sleeps in the small cabin on the mountain like many subjects do in lives between lives movement. How about many metaphysical travelers bringing information about independence of our soul from the other side? Are Kalimagdora and her mother representing loving and forgiving death when we completed another cycle of our existence? Is their tiny house representing hereafter? Are we returning to our true home after one life being like on a vacation or in a suffering, which became to be too long? We cannot ask Leopold Lahola, he is gone. But he gave as a chance to think about it.
