Discoveries from Czech Republic World Cinema

This semi-fictional short film follows the protagonist to Prague and explores how the medium of film can access the memories of a city. The film is based on the family history of the director, who fled Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968.

A jumble of images of the seashore, grassy plains, and dense forests merges into one blurred image on the time-damaged film frame, creating an associative diary of impressions and memory fragments that pass through our minds as unpredictably as waves flowing into each other on the beach.

This short hybrid essay based on French philosopher Paul Virilio's theory of “dromology” follows a racecar driver named Irina, who enjoys life in the fast lane more than anything else, and a French expert who explains how speed and velocity have always been fundamental factors of political power. The result is a reflection on both the practical and ideological aspects of speed and how velocity relates to gravity, the human experience, presence, and power-driven practices.

A concert took place on October 30, 2019, at the cultural center in her native Otvovice, which Bílá purchased and which has effectively become her private stage.

In 2001, the traveler Láďa found a discarded suitcase with a plastic bag containing twenty-two undeveloped films in a container. It turned out that six Asians on their way to Scandinavia were immortalized on them. The film crew wondered if these six men could be found.

Emma doesn’t like living in a big gray world. It also seems that boredom, responsibilities and numbness have affected her mom as well. In an unguarded moment, she loses Emma from her sight. Do they have a chance of overcoming the city and finding each other?

A threefold portrait, presenting the reality within the limits of a subjective view, puts together the lives of an increasingly more remote writer and musician; a hacker, dreaming his dream of transformation into a purely virtual existence in the depths of technology; and an undertaker, unrealistic raconteur, living on the history of half-mythical Sudetenland.

A poetic cartoon set in a sauna, or rather a typical Russian "banya". A woman tormented by her relationship and perhaps her own life is ready to leave both. The "mine" becomes for her a place of salvation, contemplation, physical and mental regeneration and finally liberation.

After dreaming of her father's death, a young woman begins to inhabit the turbulent landscapes of his dreams and memories, uncovering fears that mirror her own.

Adolescents' search for their own identity and defining themselves in relation to the older generation, which persisted throughout the twentieth century, took various forms. In the final installment of the series, we learn who were the grebes, the crawlers, the hairies, and the punks. We'll take a look at dance halls, parties and discos, and find out why Czechoslovakia never introduced systematic sex education in schools.

This time-lapse documentary captures the fate of five homeless people who have gained a new chance in life thanks to the Housing First project in the Czech town of Otrokovice. Thanks to the help of social workers and a council flat, they try to reintegrate into society while continuing to fight the demons of the past. Will they be able to return to life?

“Puppeteer, tell us a story we don’t know yet!” the audience calls out to a traveling thespian. And so he starts to recount a story about a boy born of the forbidden love between brother and sister, who had many adventures, who spent 17 years tied to a rock, and who perhaps was also… a hedgehog? But that’s not as important as how, after overcoming all these obstacles, he ended up becoming the Pope.

A ready-made work constructed from a 70mm film reel of unknown origin. Fragments of an action film — helicopters, chase sequences, rollercoaster trajectories — are reassembled into a continuous field of motion. Through re-projection and rhythmic bursts of light, the original footage is reactivated, displacing narrative in favour of spatial and kinetic intensity. The image unfolds as a dynamic structure of movement, where locomotion, repetition, and scale produce an immersive experience of disorientation and propulsion.

After having to cancel her visit back home because of the turmoil and unrest of the political state of her home country, an expat in Prague tries to revive the Iranian tradition on her own, trying to make it feel like home.

A girl. A new apartment. Pills, blood — and a talking bug in the bathtub. One night slowly falling to pieces. Reality pours from the tap, food turns vile, and no one is coming to save you. A small, dirty film about how your own mind can eat you alive.

What happens around us when we’re immersed in something else?

Imagine a group of friends who met through the climate movement. For several years, you have fought alongside others for a fairer future, but little has significantly changed, leaving you somewhat exhausted. Now, you go away for a weekend at a cottage to rest—and during that time, you find yourselves in an apocalypse for a single day.

i hear something i hear something. oh no I hear it, it’s all beatle sounds it’s ringo it’s paul it’s john it’s george oh i’m so overwhelmed

Today, many laundry soaps in the Czech Republic are referred to as “the soap with the deer on the label.” However, the original product was manufactured by the Schicht factory in Rynoltice near Liberec. In the mid-19th century, Georg Schicht founded a small family business in the basement of a local house, which later grew into a multinational corporation. The progressive company's stability was first tested by World War I, then by the collapse of Austria-Hungary. The greatest upheaval came with the expulsion of the German population after World War II and the confiscation of property. Schicht's descendants are now scattered around the world. Their search for their roots forms the backbone of a documentary that captivatingly reconstructs the history of one company and one family.

For its traditional outdoor season-closing concert held on Hradcany Square at the foot of Prague Castle, the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Finnish-Ukrainian Dalia Stasevska performs works by Leos Janacek, Lili Boulanger, Georges Bizet and Maurice Ravel.

Tumi Björnsson want's to find out if anyone else can be Tumi Björnsson. He hires a film crew to document the process of transforming the 18 year old American, Silas into Tumi Björnsson. Will Silas be able to trick Tumi Björnsson's mom into thinking that he is Tumi Björnsson?

23-year-old Bela struggles to find independence while living with her anxious and overprotective mother, Ida.

Two rabbits are falling in love. Later, the little mole witnesses the birth of three rabbit babies.

The film Kytka was made by René Slauka in the first half of the 1990s, along with other computer animations that he created independently or in collaboration with Věra Geislerová. Both were members of the Video Sector, founded by Radek Pilař. They participated in the first presentations of these video artists, as they called themselves. Slauka, like Věra Geislerová or another member of the Video Sector, Lucie Svobodová, saw new possibilities of visual expression in computer animation. Slauka, who focuses on recordings of everyday and even intimate situations in his photography, devoted his computer animation to simulating space and depicting everyday things as attributes of the material world.

The short film Images represents one of the first audiovisual works of art created in Czechoslovakia, the production of which was made using computer animation. During her studies in the Film and Television Graphics Studio at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, Lucie Svobodová focused primarily on classical animated storytelling through figurative drawing, but in one of her first films, Images, she abstracts the central plot and character and develops the possibilities of a new color morphology through the Amiga computer graphics system.

Memories of eyewitnesses, a portrait of a left-wing intellectual viewed from different angles and illustrated with archive materials and a theatre mis-en-scene. A man who used power to promote the Communist Party policy in Slovakia only to become its victim when sentenced to life. A story of a career politic who became a representative of the Prague Spring when released, and then ended up being a president of oblivion, an icon of normalization and decay of the Czechoslovak state.

The documentary captures the film passion and creative journey of director Václav Marhoul. Through personal memories, he describes how he was fascinated by film since childhood and how his curiosity shaped his career. Curiosity as a driving force of creation and life is thus at the heart of the film.

This satirical sketch follows a young couple on vacation, whose sunny afternoon at the beach is soon overshadowed by a cloud of conflict. A short reflection on self-confidence and the pursuit of perfection.

In my film, I try to understand what it's like to be a mom, but not to be where moms are, somewhere at home with their kids. So I ask my distant aunt, who went to Banat for four years, what it was like. How did she cope with the pressures of her surroundings, the homesickness and all the hard and beautiful things that surrounded her decision. I visit the place where she lived and reflect on what I would have done myself.

In his pride and disregard, man sometimes forgets that he is not superior to the animal kingdom, but merely a part of it. This documentary essay juxtaposes images of emptied human activity and the animal's dislocation from the natural order. Without shallow moralizing, it invites us to reflect on the ordering of the world among us animals.

The documentary charts a voyage of almost 2,000 nautical miles across the Arctic Ocean. But the expedition to places where frost and ice reign supreme was no mere adventure. The film adaptation by director Vladimír Šimek gives the viewer a glimpse into the authentic atmosphere of these wild places, to experience the stunning, yet so fragile beauty that goes beyond the simple human imagination. In addition to educating and entertaining, the film crew has prepared for its viewers an extraordinary aesthetic experience that shows us in a non-violent way how vulnerable our planet is if we do not change our emissions policy.

This experimental film takes a closer look through the entomologist's lens at the cyclical behavioural patterns linking humans to the insect world. Just as the fig wasp inevitably finds death in the pollination of the fig tree flower, we too are thrown into the dance of passion and death. Drawn by the seductive scent of allurement and the inevitability of the final end.

New documentary about the Russian Memorial society, the history of its liquidation and the extremely difficult situation in which its employees found themselves after the start of full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine. Many of them were forced to leave Russia, some ended up in the Czech Republic.

A romantic comedy that tells the story of a teenage girl navigating the modern dating world. Emma pours out her frustrations into her diary about the challenges of finding true love in a world where bad dates follow worse ones, and dating apps bring more despair than hope. But what if what Emma really needs is not what she's been so desperately searching for? The film reveals that love can come unexpectedly.