" "Whatever you hold close in life turns into its opposite. Only madness is a guarantee that you won't be unhappy," observes one of the characters in Slovak director Juraj Jakubisko’s anarchic early masterpiece. Shot immediately after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, the film is a kaleidoscopic portrait of three bohemian free spirits – two unemployed men, Yorick (Jiří Sýkora), named after the dead jester in Hamlet, and Andrej (Philippe Avron); and a young Jewish woman, Marta (Magda Vášáryová, from MARKETA LAZAROVÁ) – who live in Fellini-esque splendor and decay among fluttering birds, hedgehogs, a broken piano and wandering children in medieval clown outfits. Each of them orphaned by war (the specter of WW2 and the recent invasion hangs over the film like a shroud), the three engage in a seemingly-carefree JULES & JIM-style love triangle – “Love shouldn’t be selfish,” as Yorick says, and yet the film proves the opposite. Filled with tons of casual hippie nudity and shot with restless handheld camera, jump cuts and fisheye lenses, BIRDS… is an impossibly-passionate mixture of EASY RIDER, Chytilová’s DAISIES, and Beckett-style Theater of the Absurd (Yorick and Andrej could easily double for Vladimir and Estragon in Godot, or the tragic Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern.) Like the best of 1960s New Wave Cinema, it distills the decade’s free-flowing spirit where conformist society is a distant memory and threat, and life is a carnival of sex, drinking, and philosophical musing – until the straight world comes crashing in. Confronting issues of anti-Semitism and Jewish identity, anti-Fascism and the devastating aftermath of the Prague Spring, BIRDS… was banned from release for 20 years, and remains one of Jakubisko’s most heartbreakingly mad and inspired films, powered by Vášáryová’s plaintive Falconetti-meets-Jean Seberg performance as Marta. With a stunning score by famed composer Zdeněk Liška (THE CREMATOR, MARKETA LAZAROVÁ, IKARIE XB-1, PRAGUE NIGHTS, Jan Švankmajer shorts). "Those aren't birds but the souls of the dead," as their crazed old landlord laments. First-ever U.S. Blu-ray release by Deaf Crocodile, the Slovak Film Institute and Comeback Company. In Slovak with English subtitles.