New documentary on Havel, Charter 77

Prague, Feb 6 (CTK) - A documentary on former Czechoslovak and Czech president Vaclav Havel from the 1980s that has not been known in the Czech Republic to date will be released by Italian journalist Gabriele Nissim in Prague on Wednesday, CTK was told yesterday.

Nissim made the film Young Anti-politicians in secret during his visits to then Czechoslovakia in 1986.

It will be presented by Nissim and the Art for Public civic association who will also release a petition to the European Parliament calling for the launch of European Day of the Just.

Havel, former dissident, playwright and the last Czechoslovak and the first Czech president (1989-2003), died in his country house in Hradecek, east Bohemia, on December 18, 2011, aged 75 years.

Nissim was making shots of Havel and other dissidents when he was collecting material on the 10th anniversary of the Charter 77 human rights manifesto, Andreas Pieralli, an organiser of the event, told CTK.

The film has already been screened in Italy and Switzerland.

The shots were made with a small hand camera in open spaces in order to forestall wiretappings by the StB secret service.

No one noticed the cassettes on Nissim's return home because the Czech border police thought they are music recordings, Pieralli said.

Havel commented on this then saying "the dull party chiefs were not capable of imagining at all that something like this could exist."

Nissim said the regime fell victim to its own backwardness and its own self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world.

Nissim asked Havel last year to join the petition calling on European deputies to embed March 6 as European Day of the Just, but the letter arrived in Prague only after Havel's death.

Nissim would like the day to mark the memory of those who fought totalitarian regimes and who did not hesitate to risk their lives to save others. He wants Havel to be named one the "just."

Nissim is a journalist, writer and historian. He follows the developments in Central and East Europe. He also takes interest in the fate of the Jewish community and in genocide as such, for instance, in Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda and former Yugoslavia.