The End of August at the Hotel Ozone

Pavel Jurácek, one of the leading lights of the Czech New Wave of the 1960s, scripted this bleak portrait of a post-apocalyptic world. After simultaneous nuclear attacks by the East and West wipe out the lion's share of the Earth's population, a band of eight women in their mid-twenties to early thirties, led by an elderly female military officer, wander the landscape of Eastern Europe searching for food, supplies, and other survivors. In time, the women discover a dilapidated hotel that has become home for a lonely old man who guards a few tattered remnants of the former civilization -- a television that no longer works, an old newspaper, and a wind-up phonograph. Starkly photographed in black-and-white, The End of August at the Hotel Ozone marked the second collaboration between Jurácek and director Jan Schmidt, who previous co-wrote and co-directed the short subject Postava K Podpírání. (AllMovie.com)