Produkce Radim Procházka

Film crew on the road: Director (Jaroslav Plesl), his Producer (Simona Babcáková), and their Director of Photography (Jirí Vyorálek) and Sound Arist (Johana Svarcova). Starving artists who already have a number of films to their names, Czech Lion award-winning films, excellent reviews and have been screened at numerous festivals, but they don't have audiences. Their next collaborative effort - the Director's lifetime dream - is quickly becoming oblivion because he failed to win a grant, which means it won't be made. And so the frustrated Director and his colleagues await their chance among record-holders of curious disciplines such as crawling with a squash racket or collecting four-leaf clovers. How will the collision of these two worlds end? What will the Director's next film be about?

Even amongst Christmas decorations a spark of fancy may appear. What to do though when merciless Fate (or the human hand) has placed our beloved right to the other side of the tree? No use crying when a decoration wants to achieve something - it must unhook itself. And thus, our snowman Karel sets off with the straw angel Kamil in search of snow-lass Eva. They wander through the Christmas tree overcoming obstacles, and with the help of other distinctive decorations they eventually reach Eva who is being held captive by the evil Balls brothers.

Libor, a former teacher, enjoys a well-paid position as a bank manager, living in a luxurious villa outside Prague. His business partners are taken into custody and the authorities have a few questions for him to answer. Rather than wait around, he decides to take off to Moravia with his wife and two children. In the process, he pretends that everything is normal, rediscovers the value of family life, meets up with a former colleague lost in provincial obscurity, and becomes the object of a manhunt. Libor is not a criminal type, merely someone who signs cheques and is drawn into a business world failing to recognise its own criminality (he doesn’t even flee the country).

Jan calls himself Buffalo. He loves cowboys, he’s blind, and may lose his hearing. The documentary follows his journey to America to visit the chief of the Navajo tribe, who wants to perform a ritual to help his hearing. The film is full of unpretentious humor thanks to Jan’s charisma. In the USA, he’s like the Don Quixote of the Wild West - a naive adventurer in a world that is much more ordinary than his imagination. This observational, but not standoffish, film is also an example of how the medium of film can relate to blind people by constantly showing the difference between what Jan perceives and what we actually see.

Czech Photographer Josef Koudelka grew up behind the Iron Curtain and always wanted to know "what was on the other side". Forty years after capturing the iconic images of the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, the legendary Magnum photographer arrives in Israel and Palestine. On first seeing the nine-meter-high wall built by Israel in the West Bank, Koudelka is deeply shaken and embarks on a four-year project in the region which will confront him once again with the harsh reality of violence and conflict. Director Gilad Baram, Koudelka's assistant at the time, follows him on his journey through the Holy Land from one enigmatic and visually spectacular location to another.

A children's film about the largest mass suicide of the 20th century reconstructs the 1978 event. The Reverend Jim Jones forced nearly a thousand followers of his People's Temple sect to drink poison in the settlement of Jonestown, Guyana, South America. A third of them were children. Jan Bušta gives sadists, voyeurs, and necrophiliacs one minute to leave the cinema. His self-reflective documentary, which is the result of ten years of time-lapse filming, does not depict dramatic scenes. To the sound of an audio recording from that fateful day, we see a collage of child ghosts preaching about escaping the corruption of the world.

Stylized as silent cinema, the film connects political and philosophical extremes of 1913 in a story of a young man participating at the creation of a new world. This mysterious adventurer, who was known as Peter the Lett, gets involved in a tragicomic and surreal race from a routine clerk job and a romantic passion in Riga to preparation of the world revolution in Vienna, psychoanalysis at Freud’s salon and seduction of Mata Hari in Paris.

Animation of recently discovered floor drawings on the wall of the former ghetto, combined with a reference to the opera Brundibár, which was supposed to become proof to the world of the wonderful lives of imprisoned children.

Karel Vachek’s latest documentary essay deals with the fine line between an internal belief in God and institutionalized religion. At the same time it brings up the need for a healthy sense of skepticism and the benefit of not believing in anything that advertises itself as certain. The filmmaker sets out for the USA, Japan, Great Britain, Poland, and the Balkans in his sometimes amusing investigation of spiritual substitutes, such as esoteric "teachings” or various fraudulent and magical practices, to which we sometimes fall prey due to our natural religious cravings. In addition to a Czech "prefab” family, who describe the carryings-on of their poltergeist, well-known mystery buffs appear in the film: Erich von Däniken, Raymond Moody Jr., and Ivan Mackerl.

Near us, nature takes back what man has stolen. Within the environment of open cast brown coalmines and spoil tips which are the reminder of a lunar landscape, one finds paradoxically a true tale of an impregnable wild countryside.

Isabela, a retired woman, floods her drug-addicted neighbor's apartment with her washing machine. A repairman must be called. The handyman arrives at the apartment, which does not look like the home of a lonely senior citizen, but rather like a clinic for deranged individuals... Isabella's neighbor is unable to fulfill his late wife's last wish, the flooded junkie hates pensioners, refugees, and the government, and Isabella is visited by her offended husband, who has been dead for years and complicates her life and the repair of the washing machine... During this bizarre visit, the illusion of one happy marriage falls apart, one old misunderstanding is cleared up, and several others arise. The second half features the short film Barcarole, also produced by Divadlo Verze.

From his truck, rising online star Štefan Pongo streams his political rants and creates social media movements that go viral, in support of Romani people across Europe.

Schmitke is an old German wind turbine engineer. One day, he is dispatched to the Czech side of the Ore Mountains to fix an old squeaking wind turbine. His colleague disappears and mysterious things begin to happen in the forest.

Slovak director Zuzana Piussi examines her fellow countrymen’s current notions of nationality. She expresses her concern that Slovak national sentiment is rather fragile and liable to political misuse. The protagonists often reject the leading Czech figures of Czechoslovak history and prefer to look for their roots in the common “pre-national“ past of Great Moravia. Although many of the stories are rather tragicomic, the turbulent developments in the EU have shown that the search for one’s own identity is a sensitive matter not only in Slovakia.

The opening of The Vasulka Effect couldn’t be more apt: Steina Vasulka addresses her husband Woody through various TV screens. He does the same and replies. A perfect image of the relationship between the free-spirited, groundbreaking pioneers of video art. After meeting in Prague in the early 1960s, they relocated from Czechoslovakia to New York, where they later founded The Kitchen, their legendary art and performance gallery.

A dog's funeral becomes part of a chain of absurd events including a tomato ketchup battle, a reconstruction of the battle of Austerlitz and a motorbike show. Its common denominator is the commercial interest of sponsors and big business, the ambivalent winners of privatization and participants of numerous corruption affairs. Vachek debates corruption and environmental disaster, but insists that there is an alternative. Against the mass of "pseudoevents" is the independent techno-party CzechTekk, raided by the police despite the fact that it was entirely law-abiding, whose participants are Vachek believes to be the new "unionists".

1940. On the border between Latvia and the USSR, a woman is killed in front of her house as she tried to protect her son from the liberating attack of the Soviets. Almost 80 years later, the archive photo bearing witness to this news item and representing a collateral victim of the European Union’s founding conflict forms the starting point for a journey undertaken by Davis Sīmanis. He navigates from one side to the other of this border, which today represents another separation, one that is geographical but also cultural: between Europe and Russia.

Sons of two different natures come to live alone with their stroke-paralyzed father and their seriously ill mother. Libor, a religious teacher, with his wife Jana, and Jirka, an atheistic, indecisive and melancholic photographer, with his young son Dominik and his young lover Nikol. Both brothers have to cope with partner problems in addition to their parents' illnesses. Libor and Jana's relationship is marked by futile attempts to conceive. The divorced Jirka, who is thinking of going abroad, does not know how to treat Nikol, who is also ignored by the family. After three days, the father dies, which brings some reconciliation, but the problems of their relationship remain open.

In the middle of the village of Drnovice, with a population of two thousand, near Vyškov in South Moravia, stands a football stadium for eight thousand spectators. It is a pyramid of a defunct football civilization, once ruled by famous names such as Karel Brückner and Radek Drulák. The rise and fall of the Drnovice football club is typical of Czech football, politics, and business in the 1990s—behind it lie not only beautiful goals, but also mysterious sponsors, corruption, and doping. Let's travel back to a time when even the highest-ranking government officials couldn't tell heating oil from gasoline, and when Czech footballers were playing for the European title.