The seemingly simple question, “What is your greatest wish?” provokes the respondents to formulate their value system. The heroes of this film are young people born towards the end of the communist regime or shortly after the Velvet Revolution.
The Greatest Wish loosely follows up the eponymous classics of Czech documentary filmmaking by Jan Spata from 1964 and 1989. In these films Jan Spata mapped the dreams and attitudes of young people at key times of the totalitarian era.
Twenty years on, his dauther Olga Špátová has picked up where he left off, as an insight into her own generation. She chose schools, prisons, institutions, demonstrations, the city and the countryside as vantage points from which to examine this topic; the film’s scope takes in birth and death. Social outcasts, ambitious professionals, people in love, civic activists and absolutely ordinary people open their hearts in the film. The Greatest Wish is an essay about people at the start of their life’s journey; about their hopelessness and also their will to find
meaning in life, the ubiquitous longing for love, and youthful ideals that will not be silenced.
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