Ester Krumbachová is one of the lesser known figures to have emerged from the Czech New Wave of the 1960s and early 1970s.  A regular collaborator with better known filmmakers Věra Chytilová and Jan Nemec (to whom Krumbachova was briefly married), she worked as a screenwriter and costume designer on some of the period’s most iconic films, as well as directing one film from her own screenplay.  Many of her films revolve around food and feasting - often as a symbolic manifestation of greed and corruption - so she makes a fitting heroine for our Gastroplex Weekend!

Two young women set out on a warpath of gluttony and chaos – since the world has gone corrupt and bad, why shouldn’t they?  After sampling the original forbidden fruit, their anarchic odyssey leads them through restaurants and bars, a bedroom full of phallic snacks, various fields of crops and – in the memorable finale – a banqueting hall laid out with an eye-popping feast of gastronomic delights, the destruction of which caused the film to be banned by authorities who saw the act as ‘wasteful’. The act of eating has rarely been so political!  

Krumbachová’s screenplay (co-written with director Chytilová) is by turns hysterical, satirical and provocative, and her costume designs have become an iconic emblem of female resistance, inspiring everything from punk and new wave to riot grrl and rave.