Czech Film Center

Synopsis

The documentary film A Town Called Hermitage (original title Poustevna, das ist Paradies) focuses on the community of Dolní Poustevna (Lower Hermitage), a small town on the Czech side of the Czech-German border. After World War II almost all of the local inhabitants, Sudeten Germans, were expelled. In the intervening six decades new people have settled there; they have come from various corners of the world and built new lives in a place which is essentially without roots. The Vietnamese teenager Denisa spends most of her time working at her family’s stall and dreams of returning to the country of her birth. The Sudeten German pensioner Mrs. Váňová is the last of Hermitage’s pre-war inhabitants, having only been allowed to stay because the Czechs valued her skills as a maker of artificial flowers. The young Dutchman Daan has escaped with his family from the urban clamour of Western
Europe in order to live closer to nature. Volker, a 50-year-old German engineer, lost both his work and his family after the reunification of Germany; for him the bars, markets, and brothels of Hermitage have become a second home. Meanwhile, the mentally handicapped Luboš and his friends, who live at one of several local institutions, are ever-present fixtures in the unusual town. The film’s characters reflect Hermitage’s unexpectedly diverse community; for some of them the town is paradise, for others something closer to hell. They do not live together but alongside one another, in some respects rather like hermits.