In 1963 a documentary film, Children Without Love [Dětí bez lásky], was smuggled out of Communist Czechoslovakia to the Venice Biennale film festival – and was screened in cinemas at home, surreptitiously tagged onto the end of a Miloš Forman film. It showed emotionally distressed young children looked after for long hours in state crèches, many from the first weeks of infancy. A collaboration between filmmaker Kurt Goldberger, child psychiatrists, a crèche headmistress and a reformist journalist, the film eventually led to a change in the law, with the Communist Party committing to extend paid maternity leave for women, reversing the state’s ideological prioritising of collective child-rearing and full female employment.

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