An inept Slovak peasant is torn between greed and guilt when the Nazi-backed bosses of his town appoint him “Aryan controller” of an old Jewish widow’s button shop.
Made near the height of Soviet oppression in Czechoslovakia, The Shop on Main Street features intense editing and camera work which won it the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1965. The film fuses humor and tragedy to scathingly explore one cowardly man’s complicity in the horrors of a totalitarian regime.
Filmography: Adrift (1971), Obzalovany (1964), Music from Mars (1955).
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