Sixty Years of Daisies [talk + screening + party]

Celebrate Věra Chytilová’s iconic New Wave film w/ a discussion on its radical legacy, a screening, and a Daisies-inspired rooftop party.

The Czech Center New York celebrates Věra Chytilová’s Czech New Wave classicDaisies (1966) with an evening of conversation exploring the film’s aesthetic, political, and cultural resonances from its original socialist context to its enduring influence today.

Drawing on their contributions to a forthcoming dossier in JCMS: The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, scholars Barbora Bartunkova, Tanya Goldman, Maggie Hennefeld, Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen, Dijana Jelača, Meta Mazaj, Masha Shpolberg, and Aurore Spiers will approach Daisies from a range of perspectives. Together, they will trace the film’s connections backward to early cinema and forward to contemporary pop culture, while also considering its reception in Czechoslovakia and its later canonization through feminist film culture in the United States. The event will also include the premiere of a short Daisies-inspired film by experimental filmmaker Kelly Gallagher.

The forthcoming dossier revisits Daisies as both a landmark of the Czech New Wave and a living and breathing work that continues to inspire new interpretations across generations and political contexts. Speakers will explore the film’s anarchic humor, experimental collage aesthetics, feminist subversion, relationship to socialist modernity, and surprising echoes in contemporary culture — from avant-garde cinema to the aesthetics of Charli XCX’s “BRAT summer.” Together, these talks collectively examine why Chytilová’s radical and playful cinematic language continues to resonate sixty years after the film’s release.

The discussion will be followed by a cinema screening of Daisies and by a Daisies-themed rooftop gathering with refreshments and music. 1960s-inspired dress is warmly welcomed.