Discoveries from Czechoslovakia World Cinema

1979 Czech experimental film by Petr Skala

A continuous, extreme show is held, every year, in Tesla Arena in Prague. The visitors can be impressed by shows of dangerous riding on motorcycles, amazing acrobatics on 4 wheel vehicles, etc…

Eliška Junková, born in Olomouc, is among the first women in Czechoslovakia to earn a driving licence. After winning several European races, she competes in the famous Targa Florio in 1928, earning multiple awards. Following her husband's death at the Nürburgring, she ends her racing career, yet even in its brevity, joins Europe's elite. The portrait of Junková is made by the late director Rudolf Adler, a teacher of documentary filmmaking and author of the first textbooks on the subject, who headed FAMU's Department of Documentary Film from 1990 to 1994.

A documentary about lamentation songs of Bulgarian funeral rites.

Meat evokes happiness hormones, but behind the gentle words “pork belly” or “neck” lies a meat factory where meat is divided, quartered, and cut up. With sharp candour, this critical morality play draws attention to the ecological, economic, and ethical implications of factory pig farming, and the striking contrast between the Czech culture of overeating, and starvation in Africa.

The second film from in this category, Etudes for the Electron Microscope (20 min., 1988), is is characterized by formal experimentation in both image and sound.

Animals try to escape from a flood.

A short Czech film which documents a large family and the house they have built by hand.

Trnka brings to life a surrealist circus of tightrope-walking fish, musical monkeys, balancing bears, and high-flying acrobatics in this whimsical feat of cutout animation made in collaboration with leading Czech painters of the era.

An animated short from Viktor Kubal

Welcome to real life, little mole! Incited by a television report, the comfortable coexistence of the gardener and the builder of mounds is threatened, and not just that, so is the mole’s cosy home underground. Rarely did the colourful Czech animation series for children show such a serious and brutal fight for existence.

Document about a new method of producing ductile iron in induction furnaces, which is the first in the world to be carried out in Czechoslovakia.

A young man named Milan arrives at the zoo, having decided to study veterinary medicine. He meets his older colleague Kalman, a tough and cruel zookeeper who despotically controls not only the animals but also the people around him. From that moment on, their paths in life constantly cross, and the tension between them grows, also due to their shared interest in the same woman.

An adventure with living figurines from a Christmas tree. A restless little devil bothers the other ornaments hanging on the Christmas tree. When he wakes up a child and makes it cry, he's finally punished.

A short film which documents early lumber and textile manufacturing processes.

The mouse falls ill, and the owl advises the mole to find a Matricaria Chamomilla flower. However, she does not have time to tell him where the flower grows. The mole travels the whole world in search of the flower, only to discover that it grows in their meadow.

May was filmed as a backdrop to part of a theatre performance D36-D37 under the E. F. Burian's lead inspired by the classic Czech poem of the same name by Karel Hynek Macha.

The peak of Slovak director Karol Skřipský's (1908) career can be traced back to the late 1950s to early 1960s. He is a leading popular science documentary filmmaker, known mainly for his films on nature and ethnography. In 1960, together with Martin Slivka, he released a film about ornamental motifs in folk interiors in western Slovakia, and his Ždiarske rekviem (Requiem of Ždiar) is a picture of traditional life in a Slovak mountain village throughout the year. In 1967, he attracted attention with an interesting report on the life of a lonely Robinson Crusoe in the middle of the Eastern Slovak Lowlands, entitled Štyri dni Ľudovíta Čonku (Four Days of Ľudovít Čonka). His work focuses on films about the High Tatras, and he ranks among the leading directors and cinematographers working on this theme.