THE GREATEST WISH The seemingly simple question, “What is your greatest wish?” provokes the respondents to formulate their value system. The heroes of this film are young people born towards the end of the communist regime or shortly after the Velvet Revolution. They have never known political repression, are relatively well-off and are the first generation of adults shaped by a free society. The Greatest Wish loosely follows up the eponymous classics of Czech documentary filmmaking by Jan Spata from 1964 and 1989. In these films Jan Spata mapped the dreams and attitudes of young people at key times of the totalitarian era. On 17 November 1989 the student demonstration on National Avenue, which led to Czechoslovakia gaining its freedom and democracy, was filmed and included in second instalment of The Greatest Wish. At that time his daughter Olga was five years old. Twenty years on, the twenty-five year-old director has picked up where he left off, shooting the feature-length documentary The Greatest Wish as an insight into her own generation. LOVE, FAMILY, SUCCESS, FREEDOM are enduring values shared by all three of the last generations. Even though the social and political situations are different, many of the protagonists appearing in these three films have tried to define and express their idea of happiness. The director chose schools, prisons, institutions, demonstrations, the city and the countryside as vantage points from which to examine this topic; the film’s scope takes in birth and death. Social outcasts, ambitious professionals, people in love, civic activists and absolutely ordinary people open their hearts in the film. The Greatest Wish is an essay about people at the start of their life’s journey; about their hopelessness and also their will to find meaning in life, the ubiquitous longing for love, and youthful ideals that will not be silenced. It is an inspiration for the protagonists’ contemporaries and a message to those no longer young that the up-and-coming generation harbours a surprising and admirable sense of hope.