'I, Olga' Charts One Woman's Path From Alienation To Brutal, Senseless Violence
The film about a young woman who ran her truck onto a Prague sidewalk in 1973, killing eight pedestrians, is tough to sit through, and recent events lend it a chilling sense of relevance.
Brutal in both subject matter and presentation, the art-house biopic tells the story of the last woman to be given the death penalty in Czechoslovakia. Olga Hepnarova, a suicidal 22-year-old who drove her truck onto a Prague sidewalk and killed eight pedestrians in 1973, attributed her act of mass murder to her own sense of alienation from the world. To communicate this, it's understandable that directors Tomás Weinreb and Petr Kazda would choose to, well, alienate their audience. Cue the standbys of austere Eastern European cinema: the chilly black-and-white cinematography, the lack of a
