Jana Brejchová

A poignant overview of how short life can be, this interesting drama from Czech director Vojetch Jasny is divided into four separate segments. In the first skit, a young child’s impressions are observed as his newborn baby sister becomes a part of the family. In the second, a young woman falls in love for the first time one summer, and in the third, a tough, older peasant woman battles against the farming cooperatives. Finally, in the last segment, everything comes full circle as a woman who is about to become a grandmother dies while her daughter-in-law has not yet given birth.Read More »

Viktor is a prime example of passivity, he “lives as if he had everything already behind him”. Břéťa is a “charged solar battery, that keeps on charging energy”. Between these two men there enters a woman, Edita, who is uncompromisingly career oriented.Read More »

Synopsis
A psychological study of a woman who chooses solitude as an escape from the duplicity and emotional barrenness of the men around her.Read More »

The childless family of the veterinarian and mayor of a small town, Robert Rýdl, and his much older wife, Klára, is joined by an orphaned girl, Jana. The girl is grateful for her new home but she slowly begins to feel a strange atmosphere that reigns in the house. Klára brought her property into the marriage and loves her husband with a possessive and stifling love. The emotionally suffering Robert falls in love with Jana. When he realizes that the girl returns his love, he uses the offer for a business trip to Opava to run away from the insoluble problem. Jana is unhappy, she is afraid of the two spiteful maids and discovers the bad side of Klára’s outwardly kind nature. The two women pay a visit to Robert in Opava. They are walking in the town and something unpleasant happens. Rýdl’s acquaintances think that Jana is his wife and Klára his mother-in-law. Robert Rýdl runs away again, this time to Prague. He leaves Jana alone with Klára who has fallen seriously ill and finally dies. Robert is free but his previous cowardly behaviour destroyed Jana’s love. The girl leaves Robert right after the funeral.Read More »

Synopsis:
“Everyday Courage” or “Courage for Every Day” is a beautifully made fllm of great poetic restraint about a young man living in Prague before the collapse of communism. It is best described as belonging to the school of realism which marked the Czech films of the sixties, and its director, Evald Schorm, was noted for his refusal to compromise the subject matter or style of his films with the regime which controlled the film studios. An admirer of the films of the British director Lindsay Anderson, “Everyday Courage” has similarities with”This Sporting Life”, its hero striving to escape the repressive forces of a society against which he rebels, but which ultimately demoralizes him and undermines his personal relationships. The winner of the International Film Festival in 1965 it has been notably neglected, and was one of the most moving and lyrical films to emerge from the Czech school.Read More »

Quote:
Though he was very much a member of the community of filmmakers who graduated from FAMU and went on to shake things up during the sixties, Evald Schorm also stood apart from the rest. Like his fellow directors, he was using the medium to get at the absurdity of life in Communist Czechoslovakia, but Schorm was dedicated to a more direct, realistic type of filmmaking than his friends Věra Chytilová, Jan Němec, and Jiří Menzel, who readily turned to whimsy, fantasy, and comedy. Referred to as both the philosopher and the conscience of the New Wave, Schorm, whose relatively sober style has been called documentary-like (his focus at FAMU was nonfiction filmmaking) and received comparisons to that of Antonioni, explored themes of morality and the malaise of the socialist middle class (such income-based social strata did exist in Czechoslovakia), and preferred psychological portraiture.Read More »