Discoveries from Czech Republic World Cinema

A puppet love story full of the funny situations that can occur during the co-existence of a man and his unusual female life-partner. You can expect humour, romance and at times even thrill.

A young man, Petr, volunteers for a radical self-imposed experiment of total isolation in a single room, seeking inner peace but confronting his own limits. When a woman who has silently watched his experiment’s progress enters and tries to persuade him to abandon the test, Petr’s carefully constructed plans and fragile mental equilibrium are challenged.

Alone and helpless, even without hearing, one can still live. What if a person is born and life is not the happiest for them? Being born without hearing may seem like an unimaginable situation to many of us, but everyone learns to live with it. Like our main character, who was not blessed with hearing. Together with the man who cares for him and acts as his mentor, they live far from the city, leading a traditional life that many people would probably find difficult to identify with. The boy, who has never been part of social contact, finds himself in a difficult situation where he will have to try to integrate, and even though it will be difficult, he will try. Will he succeed, or will he be destroyed by a society that still does not understand him?

The mythological story of Daphne is the first plant transformation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, one of the most influential literary works of Western culture. The story is also one of the earliest written records mentioning attempted sexual violence ever. How to view the mythology of the transformation of the body into a plant in a contemporary context framed by rape culture and the constant attempts of politicians to control bodily autonomy? How to reflect on the mythological narrative thematizing the transformation of human body into a plant in times of climate catastrophe?

Audiovisual poem based on a true story of a woman, who forgot to live her life.

Undersea adventure in snowy city. A short cartoon film as a homage to Jacques Cousteau.

The experimental animated film, El Canto de las Moscas, translates the desolation caused by the violence of the Colombian armed conflict through the poetic voice of Maria Mercedes Carranza (1945-2003) and the audiovisual dialogue between 9 Colombian women. In 24 places that are visited during the course of a day, a map of terror is drawn where massacres took place in Colombia in the 1990s. Archival images, the artists’ personal memories and the use of loops and analog materials bring to life the landscapes ravaged by violence and build a polyphony of memory and mourning, a universal song of pain.

In 2003, an international peace conference was held in Ramallah in the West Bank, and Tamara Moyzes, who was studying abroad in Israel at the time, decided to cross the border and attend the conference. She even managed to sneak into a press conference with Yasser Arafat and make a video recording of it, which she then intercut with footage of her difficult journey across the border.

Bielický realized the virtual tele-performance Exodus during his time at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. His journey through the Israeli desert took place simultaneously in the physical and the virtual space using the then pioneering technologies of GPS and satellite internet.

Bonds of Freedom is an anthropological reflection on the various forms of the bonds of society. Through this lens, the film explores the milieu of mushers, dog sled riders. It follows one musher family, showing their daily routine of raising sled dogs and also the Czech Long Trail (Šediváčkův Long), a dog sled race that the family both participates in and helps to organize. The anthropological reflection is told through time-lapse montage and visual metaphors.

Go down the valley, into the dusty quarry where there is nothing near and far, just you and your mind straining to catch the slightest trembling. You can hear the crackling of fire in the distance. One must burn with full consciousness to become complete. A monochromatic deep dive into the blurred boundaries of consciousness and unconsciousness.

We all need juggling. Training attention, increasing speed, improving physical condition, connecting brain hemispheres. Enjoying community. At any age. Senior Circus!

In 2020, an armed conflict erupted in Nagorno-Karabakh. The fight over the disputed territory between Armenia and Azerbaijan has claimed thousands of lives. Four Armenians are talking about growing up during the war time, and also about the frustration that, compared to other world conflicts, this is not interested for foreign media.

Documentary film about the loss of the beloved dog Alfonz. About the search for a new dog from shelters, where the postponement and disabled dogs end. The film about leaving, breaking up and coming to terms with expected and unexpected events.

Memories of three adults on their children's convalescent stays in Spa Kynžvart. "The nurses forbade us to go to the corridor where the toilets were after curfew, so we had to pee behind the wardrobe."

A film about the journey of a book that overcomes many obstacles before it reaches its reader.

An exercise in the camera department about a man who claims that one must not believe his story, but stories are actually the only thing he likes in the world. About a man who is afraid of people, but loves their essence. A man who was told as a child that if he could find something he felt passionate about, he would always be fine, so he found drugs. Especially a man who gave up drugs to tell stories.

Martin Imrich lives and studies in Prague. But he comes from South Moravia, where he makes a pilgrimage on foot to overcome the contradiction between “tím, kým jsem, a tím, kým jsu” (“who I am” in Czech and the Moravian dialect), as he says. His video diary, accompanied by a frank off-screen commentary, captures in fragmentary form the journey to the roots and the search for the meaning of such an artistic project.

Residents of the South Bohemian town of Paštiky wonder if a thief can have a conscience. A few days after granite skulls were stolen from the cemetery gate, someone returned them, placing them carefully back in front of the church wall. The mysterious return of the stolen sculptures leads locals to wonder about the perpetrator's motives. The film is a varied mosaic of testimonies and witness statements into which they project their own ideas.

A report on carousel operators, what their profession means, and if it has a future at all. Big business, but also small genuine smiles. What's the most important part of all this?

A modern-day aborigine, alone on a deserted planet, surrounded by cold nature, builds a new world from the remnants of an extinct civilization. This surreal audiovisual work reflects on the question of human existence when the world is on the verge of destruction, evoking the mourning of an activist artist over an ecological catastrophe.

How do locations of iconic scenes in Czechoslovak classic cinema look like today? This film makes use of soundtracks to transfer viewers into the classic works of cinema of the past millennium, while, by way of contrasting footage of today’s real look of the places, it builds a provocative bridge between the past decades and contemporary times.

A visual essay accompanied by ambient electronica presents a virtual environment that only seemingly resembles our everyday world. 3D digital objects composed of both technological and organic structures create a dystopic unfamiliar landscape from which all human traces have disappeared a long time ago.

Sixty-five years later, five Holocaust survivors tell their amazing story, about the secret journal VEDEM created by a group of teenage boys right beneath the noses of their Nazi captors in a concentration camp. Seattle's Music of Remembrance and the Northwest Boychoir have united to give new voice, through music, to those boys' inspiring lives and words. But first the boys in the choir must come to know the 'boys of Terezin,' and learn the price of those boys' courageous resistance to their oppressors. Poignant, warm-hearted and profound, the film chronicles a unique legacy's passage to a new generation, through the power of music.

A visually arresting interactive exploration of a space that represents the recesses of the mind and soul, lost in the dips of depressive and anxious states. The autobiographical narrative is a composition of fragments of stories and descriptions of inner turmoil, drawing the audience into an elaborate world of sometimes illustrative, sometimes metaphorical animations and ingenious sound design to understand the causes and experience of depression, the struggle to break out of its darkness, and the feelings of futility and heaviness. Open, almost diaristically intimate notes navigate the journey through rooms, floors and different environments that embody the manifestations of inner heaviness.

Young singer from Ukraine, Marta comes to Prague fleeing the war in Ukraine. She struggles to continue sing and decides to become a volunteer.

On Tuesday, March 1, dozens of artists performed on Prague’s Wenceslas Square without entry fee. The hour-and-a-half program, which will also offer viewers insight into the current situation in Ukraine and a glimpse of Ukrainians’ lives in the Czech Republic, will be hosted by the duo Světlana Witowská and Daniel Stach. Proceeds from the concert will go to the People in Need SOS Ukraine collection. The organization has provided humanitarian aid in Ukraine since 2014, and as soon as circumstances allow, its teams will focus on meeting the most basic needs - food and shelter for internally displaced persons. People in Need stands ready to assist not only in Ukraine but, if necessary, also in neighboring countries likely to be affected by the refugee wave.

The young teenager faces the question of his own identity in this horror short film that takes us from the urban landscape to the jungle of the unknown. The film employs voyeurism and poetic narrative bordering on magical realism.

The film made by the artistic duo of Lucie Rosenfeldová and Matěj Pavlík deals with the phenomenon of phosphene - the phenomenon when variously coloured lights appear in our vision when pressure is applied to our eyes. Based on this remarkable phenomenon, often called inner sight, which has fascinated philosophers, physicians and scientists since antiquity, in their black-and-white imaginative film, the authors reveal how much human perception is influenced by social, cultural and ideological factors.

For some people, the legendary singer Jan Nedvěd represents an obsolete kitsch artist, for others a musical cult icon representing values that are rapidly disappearing. The documentary follows the daily life of a musician, advanced in his years, who embarks on (perhaps) his last tour, recalling his youth spent in the great outdoors and recounting criticism he received for performing at political demonstrations. A series of interviews with Nedvěd about his passion for music, interpersonal skills, and his twilight years supplement commentaries on loved ones, loyal fans, today's young vagabonds, and the humorous controversy of contemporary musicians stiffly parodying Nedvěd's own songs.

The ideas of the first Czech president come to life in a student film by an author originally from Magnitogorsk, Russia, who, after studying animation in Yekaterinburg, went on to earn a master's degree at UTB in Zlín. Václav Havel's inspiring ideas are underscored by a clear, straightforward artistic style.

Clothes make the man, but sometimes they also reveal what kind of beast the wearer really is. In this animated film, we visit a pleasant pastry shop, which suddenly transforms from a place of comfort, sweet idleness, and chatter into an arena full of wild animals.

Two thieves are reluctant to steal but their evil boss doesn’t want to hear it. So the two clumsy burglars, who would much rather go dancing somewhere, have to break into an abandoned house. Once inside, they stumble across a gramophone and release a bunch of ghosts from it.