This Academy Award-winning milestone of the Czech New Wave combines all the elements of the genre - cutting black humour, broadsides at bumbling provincial bureaucracy, sexual coming-of-age, and pure farce. Director Jiri Menzel's debut film started worldwide acclaim for the witty, lyrical charms of Czech cinema, buoyed by the parallel success of countryman director Milos Forman's (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) masterpiece, The Fireman's Ball.

Set in Czechoslovakia in WW11 as the Nazi occupiers wage a bitter struggle to save the war, the film begins with protagonist Milos preparing for his first day as an apprentice train dispatcher, and relating stories of idle family patriarchs who retired young, living on the fat of state pensions. Milos has similar ambitions, but he also wants to lose his virginity. His fight for his sexual liberation is matched by his involvement in attempts to sabotage 'closely observed' Nazi ammunition trains, a journey with hilarious, and tragic, consequences.