The Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was a relatively swift reaction to the Prague Spring inaugurated by the reform leadership of Alexander Dubcek. There was a proposal introducing 'socialist democracy' though it was seen as a threat to the leading role of the Communist Party and the division of Europe established by the Yalta Conference of 1945. Following the Soviet invasion, the degree of repression required under the policy of normalization was not automatically apparent. Dubcek remained in office until April of 1969 and wasn't to be expelled from the Party until mid-1970. However, the expulsion of 70,000 Party members was a telltale sign of the crisis. The film industry was relatively unscathed until its reorganization in 1969, though in mid-1970 , ten films would be banned and quite a few were stopped in mid-production. The early Seventies saw an abject fear not only of honest comment but also of possibly dangerous allegorical themes.
Directors chose safely - children's films and historical subjects while veterans produced some forgettable replicas of Fifties social realism. In this uncompromising climate, Jaromil Jires turned out of the few inspired works with 1972's And My Love to the Swallows. The story of the unswerving convictions of a wartime resistance heroine, it causes a minor ripple since her relatives had supported the Sixties reforms. Milos Forman, Ivan Passer, Jan Kadar, Vojtech Jasny, Jan Nemec and others fled the country and most of the New Wave filmmakers were unable to work.