Babicka

In a sun-dappled Moravian hamlet where linden branches whisper gossip older than the cobblestones, a formidable matriarch—part earth-goddess, part household tyrant—presides over a spinning-wheel cosmos of flaxen thread and family secrets. Her orchard-mottled cottage becomes the centrifugal point for three generations who orbit her like wary planets: a widowed daughter-in-law nursing a clandestine cache of letters inked by a long-dead cavalryman; a pubescent granddaughter whose braids trap moonlight and whose diary pages flutter like captive larks; and a prodigal grandson returned from Vienna hauling a trunk of velvet waistcoats, syphilitic poems, and a pocket watch that ticks in erratic Morse code. Around them, the village pulses with folk rites—whispered carols at the mangle-wash, the ceremonial slicing of a goose-fat loaf, the nocturnal divination by walnut shells—each custom freighted with the amber weight of superstition. When the grandmother’s will is discovered sewn inside a feather pillow, its stipulations detonate old grievances: the farmstead must never be parceled, the mulberry tree must never be pruned, and the first-born girl must remain unwed till twenty-five. What follows is a slow-motion landslide of betrayals—stolen kisses beneath a threshing sled, a barn fire sparked by a vengeful aunt, a priest blackmailed with love letters he never wrote—until the film’s heart-stopping climax: a candlelit vigil where the corpse of the matriarch is seated at the head of the table, her gnarled hand raised as if still adjudicating sins, while the living devour her hoarded winter pears and confess every trespass they dared not utter when breath still filled her lungs.