Negativ

From Paris in the 1960s to London in the first decade of the third millennium, Madeleine and her daughter Véra flit from one amorous adventure to the next, living for the moment and taking all the opportunities that life offers. But not every love affair is without its consequences, its upsets and its disappointments. As time goes by and gnaws away at one’s deepest feelings, love becomes a harder game to play.

A teenage boy, raised by a mother who considers herself psychic, takes a bullied kid into his group of violent misfits. As the group’s troubles escalate toward life-threatening situations, an inner voice awakens in the boy and, with the help of his mother and his new friend, he manages to find his own path.

When a sick factory worker becomes the first confirmed COVID-19 case in her rural Bulgarian town, she is scapegoated and ostracized by her employers, family, and entire community as the virus spreads and casualties mount.

Honza was born in 1974 into the cheerless era of socialism in Czechoslovakia. At that time, his parents Jana and Petr lived in one room in the apartment of Jana's divorced mother and her widowed grandmother. A few years later, the family moved from Prague to Liberec where Petr found a job and a little house for the family. When Honza was born, his father began writing a family chronicle and he has continued to do so for 37 years. "Private Universe" show not only the life of one ordinary family, but also how the Czech society has changed in last four decades. Who are we, where do we come from and where do we go?

Ela, 15, has a love affair, which results in her being sent to a re-education center.

The Best Driver on the road to Metamorphosis. Despite her age, BOŽENA is the best tram driver in the city. But when she has to drive a modern tram, she loses her nerve and is fired. Božena refuses to give up and tries to find a new direction in her life. But she has to hurry, her body is aging and turning into a fragile BUG. The hope for Bozena is her granddaughter, who is growing as fast as Bozena is shrinking.

As every morning, men get on the tram to go to work. But on that day, to the rhythm of the tickets inserted in the ticket-stamping machine, the vehicle gets erotic and the conductress’ desire turns the reality into a surrealistic and phallic fantasy.

Anna, a 16 year-old girl from the sticks, trades her military education for life in the big city Running away to Prague opens a whole new world where she drinks her first cappuccino and meets the kind of people she has only seen in movies.

“You bet on someone in the beginning of the process and then you wait and see what life does with them.” This is how Czech director Helena Trestikova explains her long-term documentaries. Following on from the European Film Academy Award winning RENE (2008), Trestikova brings us KATKA – 14 years in the life of a drug addict. KATKA is an extraordinarily raw and uncensored character portrait of a troubled young woman living on the edge of human existence, desperately searching for love and salvation. Will she find it in the rehab? Will she find it in the arms of the man she loves? Or in the first cry of her long-desired baby? Tagging along with her through the back streets and squalors of Prague, Trestikova gets deep under the skin of a person most of us would cross the road to avoid, and shows us Katka’s profoundly human face. You might be angry with Katka, or your heart may go out to her. One thing is certain – you will never forget her.

An explosion sends fear and terror through Berlin. Young Maxi's home is reduced to rubble and ashes, burying her mother and little brothers. Only she and her father survive the terrorist bomb attack. When she happens to meet the charismatic Karl, who tells her about a conference for young people in Prague, she seizes the opportunity to flee Berlin and her grieving father. The political movement behind the meeting claims to be working for a better Europe. Maxi has no idea how close the murderers really are to her family.

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

When Herra, a young Czech woman, falls in love with Nazir, an Afghan, she has no idea what kind of life awaits her in post-Taliban Afghanistan, nor of the family she is about to integrate into. A liberal grandfather, an adopted child who is highly intelligent and Freshta, who would do anything to escape her husband's violent grip.

A man who deals with parcels at an airport cargo company finds that he likes planes more than people.

Michal and Juraj, two students of a theological seminary in totalitarian Czechoslovakia, must decide if they'll choose the easier way of collaboration, or if they'll subject themselves to the surveillance of the secret police.

The film Mečiar is the confession of the young director Tereza Nvotová about Vladimír Mečiar and the influence that this politician had on Slovak society, but also on the life of Tereza herself. When the totalitarian communist regime fell in Czechoslovakia in 1989, Tereza was one year old. The leaders of the Gentle Revolution then decided to hold an audition for the Minister of the Interior, to which Vladimír Mečiar, an unknown business lawyer from the Slovak countryside at the time, applied. After success in bankruptcy, Vladimír Mečiar reaches the political top, from where he rules the country with a series of questionable practices. Against the background of events such as the division of Czechoslovakia or the kidnapping of the son of the president of the Slovak Republic, Tereza and her peers relive their childhood.

Ingrid works as a gynecologist in a district hospital in Slovakia in the late 1980s. Her marriage is at a standstill, she has an affair with a younger colleague in the hospital, and after work, she sits on the abortion committee where they offer Roma women sterilization after the abortion is approved. Eighteen-year-old Agáta, who grew up in a children’s home, comes to work as a nurse at the hospital. Ingrid unexpectedly becomes close to her.

This 10- year documentary follows the Alhariri family, as they integrate into Czech society, despite their different faith, culture, and traditions. While Amira becomes the cultural anchor of the family, her husband, Abdul, works hard in a small kebab shop. Their eldest son, Kenan, is scarred by his experiences of war, and struggles to find new values. His younger brother, Montaser, on the other hand, is clear about his inherited values. Son Adnan and daughter Zaina fit in perfectly with their Czech classmates from the first grade, while the youngest children, Hamud and Kamar, still have time to find their way. Amira knows what life in Europe has to offer, but she never stops believing in a return to her homeland.

An intimate portrait of a man on the edge of society, filmed over the course of twenty years.