Os Amores de uma Loira

A factory manager in rural Czechoslovakia bargains with the army to send men to the area, to boost the morale of his young female workers, deprived of male company since the local boys have been conscripted.

Loves of a Blonde has often been identified as one of the most significant and ambitious productions of the Czech New Wave, a movement in which a group of young filmmakers, many of whom were educated by the national film academy in Prague, including Forman, Ján Kadár, Věra Chytilová and Jiří Menzel, among others, took significant political risks by using cinema to protest the hypocrisy and absurdity of the Communist state.

I'll say it before and I'll say it again, of all the "new wave" movements in Europe, by far my favorite is the one that came out of the Czech cinema. The beauty, the honesty and sometimes the surrealism (though not here) is just spot on, and for me really captures what it means to have film as an art form. That Forman went on to become an international success is no surprise.