Discoveries from Czechoslovakia World Cinema

A ballad story from the life of the inhabitants of the Moravian Beskydy Mountains. The heroine is a young woman, Františka Plesníková. Františka's lover was killed by a falling tree before he could marry her, and the girl faced the bitter fate of a "roll" of illegitimate mother. Františka fought with all her might for a better life for her son Metúdek. For his sake, she eventually married an old widower farmer, Podešva. However, she soon realized that her marriage had not benefited either herself or her child.

A Czech TV film adaptation of Budd Schulberg's novel The Harder They Fall, which had previously been made as the 1956 US movie of the same name starring Humphrey Bogart and Rod Steiger.

In Jiří Barta’s imaginative debut, a magic book poses three riddles to an anteater-like creature. His reward for answering, a wrapped piece of candy, proves elusive. Barta's animation revels in the possibilities of transformation and symbolic logic.

A group of drivers paid according to their performance are struggling with hard work in a large quarry, somewhere where foxes say good night. A new worker, Marek Orban, joins the team of foreman Peter Hotka, known as Maco. Deep down, he is a deeply moral person, although he was given a suspended sentence for bodily harm. He beat up his wife's lover, to whom he must also pay compensation. Marek hides this from the other members of the group because he is ashamed. Maco, out of friendship with Marko, attributes non-existent trucks to the group, which, of course, backfires. However, the team eventually shows its strength and works off the undeserved reward.

A former aircraft mechanic wants to start a new life in a small border village after a stint in prison and working in the mines. But things don't work out as he would have liked and bad luck follows him. By an unfortunate coincidence, he even falls under suspicion of double murder...

The drama of a young Slovak army officer who gradually realises the horrors of fascism during the fighting in Ukraine. On his return to Slovakia, he joins the SNP. However, he cannot overcome his loner attitude or his doubts about the meaning of partisan activity.

A Czech ship's doctor accidentally meets his fellow expatriates on a tropical island. Under his influence, a sympathetic young woman, who has gone abroad with her sickly old father and her selfish and unprincipled husband, decides to return to her homeland...

Even great love does not necessarily overcome a difference of morals - although the young hero is very much in love, he still rejects the comfortable and easy existence he could lead thanks to the family of his future father-in-law. A tediously moralistic comedy, it picks up with all seriousness the morality of a socialist man who has broken forever with petty bourgeois ideas. It is therefore too contrived, nor does it succeed in elevating the tawdry story in any way. A comedy about life's little and big compromises.

This is a reconstruction of the daily life of an ordinary family. With kindness and gentle humour, the film reveals the relationship between the older and the younger generation. The original concept of a short film study with authentic characters of the Ravager family grew into a feature-length picture on the border between a documentary and fiction. It was made as an improvisation without a previously approved screenplay in the course of only twenty days.

Repairing the risers means dug-up bathrooms, toilets, kitchens – in short, a house without water. Tenants who were strangers just a few days ago are, for completely understandable reasons, forced to live together, which in itself brings many unexpected situations and plots...

A recording of the legendary production “Audience“ from the Prague Drama Club with Josef Abrhám and Pavel Landovský. In 1975, Václav Havel worked as a labourer in the brewery in Trutnov; he could do nothing else. And it was here that he made perhaps his most successful one-act play, Audience, about the writer Ferdinand Vanek, who is invited by his superior to offer him a deal - a promotion to warehouse keeper, but in return has to inform on himself for StB reports.

The first part of a loose trilogy about the travails of two orphaned siblings, thirteen-year-old Alenka and twenty-three-year-old Zbyněk, is based on the peculiar situation of a family in which the siblings must replace each other's parents. The brother would like to get married, but is prevented by his sister, who is jealous of everything around him. So he brings his girlfriend Katherine, whom he likes, to the flat as a lodger...

Marriage to a despotic man is unbearable for Liliana Garson. After a violent argument with Garson, she leaves jewelry, a wedding ring, and a letter announcing her departure in the drawer of her husband's desk intending to run away with Hugo Paton with whom she is in love. But Hugo is killed in a car accident and feeling helpless Liliana returns home but she is offered a ray of hope from an unexpected source. Polish language version of the 1929 Ruth Chatterton vehicle "The Doctor's Secret".

Karel, a young man with an unknown past, but with a defined set of values and an ideal moral code, arrives in the village in the middle of the harvest. For the ordinary, down-to-earth villagers, Karel's lifestyle is hard to understand and they simply do not accept him into their midst. The summer ends and he leaves with his message again somewhere else. Perhaps he will return here next year to try to repeat his strange mission...

The movie depicts the harsh realities of coal mining workers in a Moravian city (Ostrava).

Dedicated to the living and the dead. Video film about the self-destruction of a young person subject to drug addiction. A dramatic story from the environment of drug addicts. Released in 1990, directed by Samuel Ivaška, based on the 1986 book by te same name written by Radek John

An alcoholic tries to rob an intellectual and suddenly recognises him as his childhood friend. They recall their childhood mischief and their glorious time, which was at the beginning of the First World War, which was at first somewhere far away, but its threatening echo was coming closer every day. In their childhood they dreamed of reaching the very edge of the world, which they thought was in Istanbul. The alcoholic takes the professor to a restaurant, and there their dreams come true. The intellectual got to Istanbul (the name of the restaurant), and the alkie was able to get drunk with his mate's money.

A physically disabled lady is alone in her apartment one evening and has just accidentally overheard a conversation about a planned murder...

Different animals play with a marble in this whimsical story from Hermína Týrlová, ‘the mother of Czech animation’

“And what did you do at school today?” In Pavel Hobl’s Czech fairytale, when Pepik and Honzik learn that school has been canceled they embark on an amazing odyssey around Prague that has them directing traffic, following the lead of a talking dog, breaking the spell an evil sorcerer has placed on a group of local musicians, rollerskating through a museum, and winning a magical car race. (University of Chicago Doc Films)