Czech Republic

Examines the human relationship with food by showing breakfast, lunch, and dinner.Read More »

A little girl goes down to the basement cellar to fetch some potatoes, and finds all her hidden fears about the cellar depicted in animated form.Read More »

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Trnka took a turn into Space Age sci-fi surrealism with this dark, dystopian satire on automatization in which a child traverses a forbidding technological wasteland to meet (surprise!) her uncanny new robotic grandmother.Read More »

Postmodernistic version of the grotesque and blasphemic novel The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch by czech anarchistic and subjectiv-idealistic philosopher Ladislav Klima (1878-1928) transposed into reality of the Prague 1989. The visual look of the film is credited by painter Michael Rittstein, a representative of the Czech grotesque. The film instead of the Prince’s headquarters takes place on the television transmitter, the main role is played by Czech punk-rock star Vilem Cok. The film is full of blasphemy, allusions to pornography and aesthetics of decay and kitsch. For Jan Nemec meant the project return to the Czech film, but also in his time shocking failure – Czech society was not ready for such hyperbole.Read More »

If Leonora Carrington was England’s “lost surrealist” the Czech title must surely go to Marie Cermínová, AKA Toyen or “the baroness” to her friends – a name that characterised her remote and somewhat aloof bearing. Like Leonora Carrington, Toyen’s life contained much hardship and loss and the art of both women reflected their intense inner suffering. Toyen knew hunger and poverty and watched those she loved dying around her, one by one.Read More »

A horror movie testing two approaches to running an insane asylum – absolute freedom versus control and punishment – within the context of a world that combines the worst of both. Jean Berlot, a young man subject to a nightmare of being forced into a straitjacket by two orderlies, is befriended by a marquis. At the marquis’s estate, Jean witnesses a black Mass, buries someone alive, and is invited to try preventive therapy. He’s willing to enter a sanatorium because he believes he can rescue a young woman from there who has told him that the real director and staff of the clinic are locked in the basement. Jean conspires with her to set them free: the horrors have only begun.Read More »

Synopsis:
Emma is a lively 25-year-old shop assistant living in a small town. Tomas is a 30-year-old roofer living in a village nearby the capital. They spend a night together, with no expectations. However, it becomes the start of a relationship, love, living together. Emma decides to unburden herself and is ready to tell Tomas about her tainted background. Tomas doesn’t want to hear it as he wants to live “here and now”. A random episode unveils Emma’s past and starts off a series of incidents which turn their lives upside down.Read More »

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This winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1947 is a social drama directed by Karel Steklý, whose style has much in common with Italian Neorealism. The main themes of Steklý’s post-war film output were social inequality, oppression, and the exploitation of the proletariat. The film’s story, which was inspired by two chapters of Marie Majerová’s novel of the same name, follows this very thematic line. Siréna depicts industrial Kladno at the end of the 19th century when a miners’ strike over low wages was uncompromisingly suppressed by the gendarmerie. The film’s impressiveness is partly rooted in the convincing depiction of the mining milieu as well as in the sombre music of E. F. Burian. The film focuses on the Hudec family, whose young daughter Emča (Pavla Suchá) serves as a symbol for the suffering of the working class in the heroic struggle against capitalism.Read More »

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Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk was the first President of Czechoslovakia (1918-1935), independence movement leader and philosopher. After the Velvet Revolution, Chytilová turns to Masaryk to ensure some continuity between her country’s past and present.Read More »