Krátký film Praha – Studio dokumentárních filmů

The age-old story of Don Juan, played by giant puppets.

Documentary showing the Czechoslovakian political landscape in March 1968, when president Antonin Novotny, a hardline Stalinist, stepped down and moderate communist Ludvik Svoboda was elected. Five months later, in August 68, the Prague Spring would end with the military intervention of the Warsaw Pact.

Frank visits his friend Josef, who introduces him to his pedigree rabbits and his wife Mary. Frank is more interested in the slightly unsettling fact that Josef and Mary's garden fence is entirely made up of living people holding hands.

An eight-part animated portrait of various species, accompanied by a different style of music. The various parts are: Aquatilia (foxtrot), Hexapoda (bolero), Pisces (blues), Reptilia (tarantella), Aves (tango), Mammalia (minuet), Simiae (polka) and Homo (waltz). Each animation mixes drawings, pictures, real animals and animated skeletons.

Documentary about old age.

A non-narrative voyage round Sedlec Ossuary, which has been constructed from over 50,000 human skeletons (victims of the Black Death).

This is funny or rather crazy adaptation of classical opera Carmen inspired by famous czech theatre Ypsilon play of the same name shot at various bizarre locations such as airport, botanical garden and winter forest.

Two magicians, Mr. Schwarzwald and Mr. Edgar, try to outdo each other in performing elaborate magic tricks, leading to a violent ending.

A television reporter visits the clerk, Mr Drobny, who answers dating ads and makes appointments with many women.

In creating the film, Evald Schorm and Jan Špáta took full advantage of the possibilities offered by the Cinemascope format and created a visual poem about the beauty and fate of trees and the simple life of people in the mountains. Dynamically slow, artistic shots of majestic nature alternate with civil documentary, yet lyrical details of human work. The film emphasizes the work and social changes in the lives of lumberjacks, but on a broader scale, it also reflects on the passage of time, the eternal values of nature and man, and his relationship to work and the collective. All this in a seemingly simple, very restrained in commentary, but all the more effective documentary story. This poeticized image of human labor was created as a commissioned film for the Ministry of Economy.

In 1990, filmmaker Jan Špáta headed to the North Moravian border region to join photographer Jindřich Štreit. His social humanist black-and-white images of the most ordinary life situations were close to his heart and offered themselves as a means of bearing witness to the social and spiritual state of Czech society on the threshold of freedom. "By allowing myself to be carried away by the world of Štreit's photographs, it is, in terms of content, one of my most raw films", Špáta rightly says. Štreit recalls, "I showed him different settings, what he would be interested in, what he would like, and it is true that he had a very easy job in two ways. Firstly, because these people were used to being photographed, and secondly, I chose the most attractive settings and the most attractive people. I knew that they were photogenic and that these were carrying situations".

"A refined film essay about the loneliness, wisdom and humility of old women. The film, most valued by Jan Špáta, was awarded the Grand Prize at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, the Trilobit Award and Special Mention at the IFF in Karlovy Vary."

A man plays the Bach piece of the title on the organ, accompanied by images of stone walls with cracks and holes that grow and shrink, intercut with images of doors and wire-meshed windows.

A famous surgeon - a trained chimpanzee named Sammy - is expected in the operating room to perform a challenging operation on a patient suffering from chimpitis...

A leading director of the Czech film renaissance provides a philosophical meditation on life and death, set amidst complex hospital apparatus and the sadness, hope, or resignation of the patients. Existentialist rather than optimist, the approach is one of humanistic atheism, accepting death as part of life. Interviews with doctors and nurses explore their outlook; all speak of death as a fact, without either sentimentality or religiosity. The studied objectivity of the film only imperfectly hides an intense emotionality.