Waiting for the darkness waiting for the light

In an oppressive suffocating environment, Pavel worked as a cameraman in the television station he called "the factory of lies," and he dreamed of a free country where he could make a film about his failed attempt to escape twenty years ago through the barbed wire that encircles the country and separates it from the rest of the world. He kept dreaming of that film as a last hope to create something real and authentic from a life of sterility, futility, boredom, alienation, isolation, and deep sadness. With the outbreak of the Velvet Revolution in 1989, which toppled the totalitarian communist regime in Czechoslovakia, Pavel found himself in a real dilemma; the end of the nightmare did not lead him out of the tunnel of darkness toward the light. On the contrary, the new atmosphere of freedom seemed strange and unfamiliar, and he faced a fundamental question: did the stagnation, helplessness, and inertia that afflicted his soul during the era of repression destroy any capacity for achievement and action? The revolution transformed him from a dreamer of love, art, freedom, and change into a manager of a capitalist company that profits from advertising and pornography. As if heroism no longer had meaning in the age of availability and possibility, and as if he had internalized and embodied that prevailing absurdity and helplessness before the revolution, feeling lost after its occurrence, remaining caught between them, and aborting his dream of any possible change.