Life is a construction site for the tenants of the only partially finished prefab housing development in Prague. Between the buildings, young mothers struggle to push their prams through mounds of mud. And things are not any better inside. Here, a corpulent man is stuck because the door will not open; there, no water comes out of the taps, but a conversation in the neighbouring apartment can be heard clear as day through the pipes. And there is no way out of the boiler room because the door has no handle …<br /> Věra Chytilová’s film depicts one day in that construction chaos through the eyes of a handful of people of various ages who have to deal with the hodgepodge of permanently makeshift solutions in what was conceived as a “garden city”. In 2002, the director said: “It’s not a critical reaction to the regime; it’s more actually a view of human behaviour.” Nonetheless, her amusing social satire was held back by the authorities and not shown in Czechoslovakia until 1981. The digitisation was undertaken from the original picture negative and sound held at the Národní filmový archiv in Prague.