The Elementary School
1991 Czech comedy film directed by Jan Svěrák
The Elementary School (Czech: Obecná škola) is a 1991 Czechoslovak comedy-drama film directed by Jan Svěrák. The screenplay comes from the pen of his father Zdeněk Svěrák. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1991 and is considered to belong among the best Czechoslovak films ever. A prequel, Barefoot, was released in 2017.
The film is set in the early post-war period, in a suburban elementary school in Prague's vicinity. A war hero is hired as a teacher, and asked to discipline an unruly class of boys. He soon earns their respect, but he is threatened with termination over his reputed sexual relationship with two highschool girls.
Plot
Shortly after World War II, in 1945–46, in one of the suburbs of Prague (the film was shot in Michle), Eda Souček attends a boys' elementary school where he belongs to a class with a complete lack of discipline. After the class drives their teacher, Maxová, to a mental breakdown during one of her classes, the schoolmaster has to implement special measures. Authoritative Igor Hnízdo, who is said to be a great war hero, is hired as their new teacher.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Elementary School” as 1991 Czech comedy film directed by Jan Svěrák. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1991 Czech comedy film directed by Jan Svěrák. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1675338. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1991, 2017 and 1945.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Elementary School” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.