Bozena

"Oranges grow in Italy," the 17-year-old Bára remarked, seemingly in passing, during a visit during which Josef Němec, a border guard officer almost twice her age, came to propose to her. It was as if the future famous writer had foreshadowed her whole life, full of unfulfilled desires and dreams of experiences and lands she had not been allowed to know.

Developing the themes of the successful television miniseries of the same name, Goddess is based on the passionate and in many ways unhappy relationship between a bright and free-spirited woman and a charismatic but hard and stubborn man. The reader gets to know a completely different Božena Němcová than the one he knows from school textbooks. The novel's treatment shatters its readable image with an unadorned description of Bozena's love life that the audience might forgive a torn poet living a century later, but not a mother of four trying to succeed in mid-19th century male society. However, the depiction of a life of poverty, eternal moving, worrying about the lives of loved ones and partnership quarrels does not harm the image of the real Božena Němcová. Rather, the reader will wonder what this extraordinarily talented and fearless woman could have achieved if she had been provided with at least a little more decent living conditions and if she had not succumbed to a serious illness at the age of 41.

The story is populated with real patriotic figures - writers, journalists, doctors, priests - and ordinary people, and it spills over from the bourgeois salons of Prague or Litomyšl into the wild nature of Šumava and Slovakia, and also into the bucolic landscape around Ratibořice and Česká Skalice. It beautifully illustrates the circumstances under which some of the texts of Božena Němcová were written, e.g. her fairy tales, Grandmother, Pictures from the surroundings of Domažlice...

The novel Goddess can also be read as an account of a sensitive and intelligent woman's longing for freedom and the conflict between dream and reality. It is the story of a woman who would like to travel to where "oranges grow" and who wanted to experience perfect and unrestricted love - but fate decided otherwise.

Hana Wlodarczyk comes from Bystřice nad Pernštejnem. In the 1990s she graduated from the Department of Screenwriting and Dramaturgy at FAMU. Since then she has worked and still works as a dramaturge on many TV projects, series and films (e.g. TV movie series Innocent Lies, TV series Most! ad. ) She co-wrote the feature film The Green Horse Thieves and the miniseries Morning Glow. As a screenwriter, together with Martina Komárková, she participated in the creation of the successful miniseries Božena, which was nominated for the Prix Europa 2021, won the Golden Icicle from the international jury at the Finale Pilsen festival and in 2022 was awarded the Czech Lion for the best TV film or miniseries. Based on many years of work on the scripts for this miniseries, a book of the same name was written.