"The first Czech book we printed was for the Melantrich publishing house. It was called 'God or the Devil'. Melantrich was based in the famous house on Wenceslas Square. So when I went there to get the data, I went up to the top floor, to the relatively small offices, and there I dealt with the client. Her name was Mrs. Machova, who, as a producer, was giving me assignments. There was a whiff of the recent past about the place as they talked from the balcony in the 1989. And I went there a year and a half later to get work. I always had a coffee there in the morning and it was a wonderful atmosphere." - "Did you go check out the balcony?" - "Of course. Check it out, of course. And more than once to check it out." - "And you also think that truth and love must triumph over lies and hate?" - "Maybe somehow... It should!"
"The biggest problem at that time was to secure work. Better said, paying for the work. To keep the company going. The key thing for me was that I set a goal that, as a newly formed company, we would really never delay paying our employees even one day. And we've done that. Even though it was often very difficult. Interbank banking was not helping us at all at that time. It often happened that I was running from bank to bank with millions in a plastic bag to be able to pay salaries."
"I don't know what it would have been like if 1989 hadn't come. I would have finished university and then I would have gotten into a cycle where you are drawn into something that you can reject, of course, but you have to define yourself by it. And in those days it was not easy to define oneself. But I was lucky. When I was finishing university, the turn of 1989 and 1990 came. And you could say that everything I had learned in those four years at university I could throw away. And start again - getting new information and finding new things. It was an amazing period, an amazing start. And one of the things I realize is that I didn't have to experience the coercive methods that if you join the party you can achieve something. That's something I see in, say, Hrebejk's films, but I haven't experienced it personally."
Jaroslav Drahoš was born on 20 December 1967 in Český Těšín and grew up in the newly built mining town of Havířov. His father Jaroslav came from eastern Bohemia. He came to the Ostrava region in search of earnings and apprenticed at the Dukla mine. His mother worked in an office, later studied law and became a judge. He spent his childhood in a town built in the spirit of socialist realism. He remembers queues for melons, records of Western bands smuggled from Poland, Polish magazines. During his studies at the Faculty of Economics, he struggled with the contradictions of socialist economy and in 1990 he defended his thesis, in which he dealt with the system of remuneration of employees in mines. He worked at the Těšínská tiskárna company, but after the coupon privatisation in the first half of the 1990s he left and with partners founded his own company. In 2024, at the time of the filming in Ostrava, Finidr was one of the largest printers in Central Europe with customers in dozens of countries.
