Burning Bush is a 2013 biographical drama built around a documented event: the protest of a history student in Prague, Jan Palach, who set himself on fire in response to the Soviet occupation of his country. Agnieszka Holland directs.
What is Burning Bush about?
The starting material here is factual rather than invented. At the centre stands a young man enrolled as a history student in the Czech capital, and the act of protest he carried out against the occupation of his country by Soviet forces. Around that centre the production assembles the people, the offices and the ordinary rooms of the period, working through them at the pace of a long-form drama. The method is reconstruction: costume, interiors, language and performance all serve circumstances that belong to the historical record rather than supplying invention where a record already exists. A viewer with no knowledge of the period can follow it as an entry point into one chapter of Central European history.
About the cast
Direction is credited to Agnieszka Holland. The ensemble is listed as Tatiana Pauhofová, Jaroslava Pokorná, Petr Stach, Vojtěch Kotek, Patrik Děrgel, Martin Huba, Igor Bareš and Adrian Jastraban, given in catalogue order, with no performer matched to a particular character, since that mapping is not part of our listing.
Context & significance
The catalogue files this one under Biography and Drama, the two labels that describe most plainly what it does. The year of release is 2013, several decades after the events it treats, which places it among the European productions that revisit the mid-twentieth-century history of the region from a distance. Czechoslovakia is recorded as the country of origin, and the listed running time is 131 minutes. Political material in a work of this kind is historical setting: the occupation and the institutions of that period form the backdrop against which recorded events took place.
Watching Burning Bush on Ktime
The page you are reading is open to anyone, with no account needed. Watching is the part that requires a K-Time account: sign in and the stream opens on the web player, on the television applications and on phones, with the interface available in Farsi throughout.