Ján Kadár

(On Cable TV, March 2022) “Dreary” is how I’d start to describe The Shop on Main Street—Emerging from the depths of Cold-War communist Czechoslovakia, this drama from writers-directors Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos engages with the horrid practice of ethnic cleansing (“Aryanization”) during World War II, as our Slovak and Jewish main characters gradually come to face the efforts of the Nazi occupiers at purifying their small village. It’s a dispiriting topic by itself, but the ending spares no one in its implacable resolution. Add to that the suffocating feeling of being stuck, in black and white cinematography, in a small Slovakian village as the Nazis roam around that explains both the film winning a Best Foreign Language film (in the middle of the Cold War, a bleak communist film taking aim at authoritarians was a solid pick) and viewers wanting to get out of there as quickly as possible.