Jan Sikl's remarkable 8-part “film cycle” PRIVATE CENTURY: a documentary set in the Sudetenland region (today's Czech Republic). A biographical portrait of Karel Saisser, a Sudeten German landowner. The film also looks at the 1938 Nazi occupation in the region. " The political and social upheavals of twentieth-century Czechoslovakia—war and occupation, the twin specters of Nazism and Communism, the Velvet Revolution—have never been more intimately rendered than in Jan Sikl's landmark eight-part series Private Century." MoMA

The authentic story of landowner Karl Saisser who lived in Velichovky on the Czech-German border in the 1930's and 40's. A successful farmer, family man and bon vivant, his life in Velichovky was a dream come true. The Saissers were German. Everything in their lives was half Czech and half German. Indeed, as far back as anyone could remember, the Czechs and German populations along the borders of Sudetenland shared a peaceful coexistence. But when the Nazis arrived in 1938, everything changed. The whole family was deported to Germany by the end of World War II.