V Masarykových rukou (2014)

In 1928, during a state visit to the small town of Zdár nad Sázavou, in the heart of the Czech-Moriavian Highlands, Tomás Garrigue Masaryk lifted three-year old Eva Neugebauer up from the crowd. He held up the child, gussied up by her mother in a kroj (the traditional Czech native costume) and bearing a bouquet for the president. Fortunately the attending press photographer, Jano Srámek had the presence of mind to take a picture. From this fortuitous moment an iconic image was born, linking Masaryk's enlightened humanism to a nascent Czechoslovak statehood in a symbolic picture of the elder statesman holding aloft the future of his nation. The photo flew around the world as an immensely popular image, just before the Nazi invasion and just after Masaryk's death. It was later transformed by the gifted Czech engraver Bohumil Heinz into a postage stamp. The great Czech writer and Nobel Prize nominee Karel Kapek pushed for the stamp being used as fund-raiser for needy children and the stamp soon became wildly popular not just among Czechs but throughout the philatelic world. During WW II and the Battle of Britain, exiled Czech airmen had the photograph made into posters to remind them of what they were fighting. To this day, Eva Neugebauerová - now Eva Hanka - receives fan mail from collectors of this stamp, many containing requests for autographs. After the fall of the Berlin Wall the stamp was then re-issued in 2000 by the once-again free and democratic Czech Republic, in celebration of those original Masaryk ideals from the founding of the first republic, and the survival through the ruins of WWI and the nearly three hundred years of foreign rule by Austrian monarchs. Eva, the unwitting child-celebrity of Czech democracy, was forced to emigrate in 1950, while the fledgling Czech democracy was once again being violated by global forces beyond its own control. She was a newlywed and fled with her husband Ladislav Hanka through the Sumava hills and across the Bohemian Wood, in a peregrination through displaced persons camps in Bavaria, postwar UN relief agency employment in Frankfurt, by ship from Bremerhafen and through the port of New York onto the corn fields, Czech communities and land grant colleges of Iowa, eventually settling among the Great Lakes in Kalamazoo. There she raised a family with her microbiologist husband and taught school. With this film she is being visited in her retirement by her great-nephew and film director Jan Rousek who answers the question, "whatever happened to that cute little girl in the stamp". The film documents a life story which, like the stamp, does not end with a picture, but becomes an epic journey which is itself emblematic of much that took place in the mid-twentieth century and wrote itself into the hearts of the people, affecting the way we live today.