Czech

Synopsis:
The film uses a mix of cut-out animation from photographs and live-action segments, and tells the story of a married man who lives a double life in his dreams, where he is married to another woman.Read More »

Kaspar Len returns home after three years in the army. He vainly searches for the mason Kryštof’s family where he had lived before he left. All he finds out is that Kryštof’s daughter Márynka, who was in his thoughts all those years, is now working in the local brothel. He goes to visit her and Márynka tells him of the misfortunes which befell her family. Her father lost his job and hunger forced him to steal some food from the merchant Konopík. Konopík caught him red-handed and threatened him with the police. He finally raped Márynka. Kryštof went mad and drowned himself in despair. Márynka grew up in a reformatory and then found herself in the brothel where she had to work to pay off her debts. Len decides to avenge Kryštof’s family…Read More »

Kafka 101, courtesy of Arte.

Kafka scholars investigate Kafka’s life and work with the aid of readings, dramatisations and clips from archive footage and film adaptations.Read More »

Quote:
After second world war the people from Ruthenia’s Carpathian villages were promised a better life in Bohemia. Once settled down they felt like strangers at the new places, so memories and tales became very important reminding them of their old homes. One of these tales is about Jakub, a man who knew the bible by heart. This film follows his trace portraying the almost forgotten loss of those people who nowadays still feel without a home.Read More »

PLOT: In the aftermath of World War II, a former Czech soldier takes charge of a manor formerly owned by a German family. He falls in love with the daughter, who is now a maid, and is forced to confront the stress between his love and his conscience when he discovers her sheltering her German-soldier brother.Read More »

The partnership between director František Vláčil and screenwriter Vladimír Körner yielded films including Adelheid (Adelheid, 1969), Pověst o stříbrné jedli (The Legend of the Silver Fir, 1973) and Stín kapradiny (The Shadow of a Ferns, 1984). But it is the historical drama Údolí včel (The Valley of the Bees, 1967) that is widely regarded as the pair’s greatest collaborative achievement. Released in cinemas shortly after Vláčil’s highly acclaimed Marketa Lazarová (Marketa Lazarová, 1967), The Valley of the Bees came about as a result of efforts to reuse the props and costumes from the director’s previous opus – hitherto the most expensive Czechoslovak film of all time. Körner’s compact concept is very different from the ambitious, expansive adaptation of author Vladislav Vančura’s historical novel Marketa Lazarová. While the former film told the story of Christianity’s battle with paganism, The Valley of the Bees is more of a timeless picture representing a battle between asceticism and freedom. Read More »

The graduate film of Jasny and Kachyna shows both the incredible abilities of its creators and the time of their creation. An untraditionally conceived feature documentary about the settlement of Moldava in the borderland after World War II.It shows the village in an entertaining way from the first settlement to the first successes of collective farming.

The graduate film of Vojtěch Jasný and Karel Kachyně was the first film by FAMU students to be distributed.Read More »

Bursting with the ideas of a who’s-who of the Central European avant-garde, this eye-opening rediscovery is the missing link between Buñuel and Vertov, the Surrealists and the Soviets. Modernist novelist Vladislav Vancura joined forces with the famed Surrealist poet Vitezslav Nezval and the founder of structuralism, Roman Jakobson, to channel their movements’ missions into one superbly energetic film loosely structured around two children caught between their variously incompetent parents and an experimental reform school (“Education by Freedom!”). Vancura unleashes a dizzying storm of competing ideas and aesthetics, mashing up genres and accepted narrative norms to subvert the framework of conventional cinema, and, by extension, society. Anchoring the film’s dizzying camera angles and bizarre vignettes is some pointed commentary, as witnessed in the excesses of the Jazz Age bourgeoisie and the struggles of the Great Depression. On the Sunny Side pulsates with an energy that’s still ahead of its time.Read More »

In the final days of the Second World War in 1945 Frantisek Pribyl is killed during a shoot-out with the Germans. After the funeral, the widow (Jana Svandová) and her two young sons Martin and Ondra move to her deceased husband’s native village at the foot of the Kralický Snezník mountains. Life in the borderlands is far from easy for the lonely woman. The village is almost deserted, food supplies are delayed; the Werwolf (Nazi guerrilla squads) are hiding in the mountains, and shooting is heard from time to time. The elder son Ondra (Michal Dlouhý) is helping out his mother and at the same time absorbing intense new experiences. He meets an old Czech resident Skurek (Lubomír Kostelka), German women working in the forest, soldiers from the engineering units removing the mines, and a young first lieutenant. At night he dreams about his dead father whom he loved very much. This is why he runs away from home when he finds out that the lieutenant is courting his mother.Read More »