Affæren i Prag

In October 1986, the journalist Niels Barfoed travelled to Prague to hand over the peace prize of the newspapers Politiken and Dagens Nyheter to Charta 77 and Vaclav Havel, who at the time was one of the leading critics of the Czech political system. What he does not know is that he and his fellow traveller, the Czech-born Martina Schepelern, are being watched by exactly this system and captured in a report that is now in the national archive. Barfoed and Schepelern returns to Prague 22 years later with this report in their hands. For this report turns out to reveal a totalitarian Eastern Europe - much worse than they, and everyone else, knew about at the time. The journey offers a joyful reunion with Vaclav Havel, who since receiving the award became free Czechoslovakia's first president; but it also becomes a gloomy and far from nostalgic look at the past.