"The Art of Dissent" celebrates the resilience and power of artistic engagement in Czechoslovakia before and after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. The documentary's main protagonists - Václav Havel, banned singer Marta Kubisová, and the underground rock group the Plastic People of the Universe (PPU) - became the most recognizable dissidents during the 1970-80s. Havel bridged the disparate clusters of individuals and fused the literary, musical, political, and philosophical nonviolent elements into a hybrid network that eventually toppled the totalitarian regime in 1989.
James Le Sueur
Director, Writer
Timothy Garton Ash
Self - Interviewee
Joan Bakewell
BBC Interviewer - BBC Archival Film
Shirley Bassey
Self - Subject (archive footage)
Kamila Bendova
Self - Interviewee
Mikhail Gorbachev
Self - Subject (archive footage)
Tenzin Gyatso
Self - Subject (archive footage)
Robert F. Kennedy
Self - Subject (archive footage)
Martin Luther King Jr.
Self - Subject (archive footage)
Frank Zappa
Self - Subject (archive footage)
A Plastic Ocean75%
Directed by John Ford70%
The Class of ‘9271%
180° South72%
In the Realms of the Unreal71%
Fuck64%
Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story62%
Maternal Instinct72%
Night Will Fall76%
Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition86%
Sidney70%
Stop Making Sense83%
Elstree 197661%
Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me84%
McQueen74%
Voyeur59%
Seduced and Abandoned62%
Love, Antosha74%
John Candy: I Like Me78%
Room 23761%
