The protagonist of Jiří Havelka’s movie The Gardener’s Year (2024, available on Netflix with English subtitles) is a silent master of passive resistance. Not uttering a word, the Gardener endures violence, injustice, and the toothlessness of bureaucracy. In an astounding Gandhi-style struggle, he does nothing but exist and insist: like a boulder in the path we would like to remove, he objects to adversity only by the force of his presence. Surprisingly, this “objective” ability to silently deflect all attacks is a fundamental proof of subjective integrity. Here, we can watch up close and personal how the radically anchored being transcends its subjectivity into objective reality, much like the Kantian dreams of morality overcoming nature.

But the Gardener is not a philosopher. At least, we can hardly catch any thoughts in his head; we can only infer his motivations from his behavior. First and foremost, it is his devotion to the soil he cultivates. This is his garden, the fruit of his labor, the union of humanity and nature. There is nothing rational, speculative, or logical; only the power of his hands—and bull’s neck.

The main story is simple: over the course of a year, we see the man struggle with a mysterious mafioso, who tortures not only the Gardener and his wife but the village as a whole. Everyone is scared of the entrepreneur of (probably) Russian origin. But no one is able to do anything, walking on eggshells and pushing bureaucracy with no effect. Finally, even his wife gives the treacherous advice: “Sell it to him. Save your life, your health, your peace.”

Sell it!

Meaning: sell yourself, sell your labor, sell your joint reality. If a subject becomes an object, they can sell themselves—but then nothing remains of them. This harsh logic of integrity leads the story to its inevitable twist: the mafioso no longer wants to buy the Gardener’s property. Of course, after ravaging his flowers and fruits, destroying his home, and even his health, the capital could hardly return to its monetary form. Now, it remains only as sheer power, i.e., violence.

The subjugation is the goal—the transformation of the objecting object into surrender—the only form of subjectivity possible in real capitalism.

Of course, Havelka did not intend to produce an anti-capitalist pamphlet. And Karel Čapek, the author of the book that serves as both a commentary and framework for the story, represents the vigilant optimism of interwar pragmatic civilism:

“But I shall not, on purpose, celebrate Labour Day, but the Day of Private Property,” quotes the Gardener from Čapek’s book in the film. “For this is my soil sprinkled with sweat and blood, and that literally; for when a man cuts off a twig or a shoot, he must almost always cut his finger, which is also only a twig or a shoot. The man who has a garden irrevocably becomes a private owner; then it is not his rose that grows in it, but his rose; then he does not see and observe that the cherries are already in bloom, but that his cherries are in bloom.”

Isn’t it that the whole movie shows nothing but a proof that nothing but private property makes sense? Behold! There are two forms of private property depicted in the movie. The protagonist is a man who forms a union with nature through his work; he is the epiphany of the unalienated integrity of human existence. The antagonist—the mafioso—represents the private property of capital, the accumulation of resources achieved by the violent exploitation of nature and humans.

From the perspective of a slapdash spectator with ideological prejudice, this truly appears to be a very conservative movie advocating traditional bourgeois virtues. But for someone with a grain of wit, it is clear that the Gardener’s story is about the power of personal property and the moral superiority of the victim of alienation.

When reading Jacques Ellul’s monograph On Violence, it was hard for me to imagine how someone could struggle for justice while refusing violence in capitalism. But the Gardener shows both the frustration and superiority of Quaker-style stubbornness. It reveals how a subject transforms into an object and back again in a moral space, and this transformation has a political meaning.

See it!

Because it is a profound example of how revolutionary philosophy can be made through film.