Abstract
Today, popular films play a significant role in the construction of cultural memory. On a national level, films dealing with historical issues contribute to the self-fashioning of the nation.
However, the rise of global streaming services and international television groups that offer the possibility of widely circulating audio-visual content, it is relevant to think also about the potential of films to create shared memories of a European past. This paper centers on contemporary Czech historical fiction films dealing with a sensitive issue of the rule of communist regime in former Czechoslovakia.
Using the example of the HBO Europe's Czech six-part drama The Sleepers (Zachariáš, 2019), I would like to discuss how the international production and the series' intended international audiences impact the way of depicting the still recent past. In the context of Czech cinema, the series represents a rather exceptional example: it is set in late 1980s Prague and captures the time of political unrest that resulted in the collapse of the communist regime, which is, quite surprisingly, an era that has rarely been represented in Czech films.
The story is presented within the genre of spy drama and deliberately links the past with the present. Drawing from memory studies and film and TV studies, I will explore the concept of "convergence" of different mnemonic frameworks in relation to audio-visual production.
I would like to argue that there has been a shift in the way the communist era is portrayed in some recent Czech films and that transnational memory might be a useful term to explain at least some facets of the change of interpretations of the past in popular fiction.