Film & Sociologie

Lada is a product of "educational“ or "corrective“ institutions. Not only is he not educated or corrected, he simply does not understand anything about life. He solves his problems in his own way – by swallowing sharp objects.

The protagonist of Dajori (mother in Romani) is forty-five-year-old Marie Hučková, who lives with her husband in Varnsdorf. After her younger sister Iveta ends up on the streets with her nine children, she decides to take her own fate and theirs firmly into her own hands and attempts to break out of the vicious circle of poverty that characterises their hometown. This sensitive film, which captures three years of a newly formed family's life together, follows the small joys and daily challenges of caring for others and asks whether a mother's love can overcome the dysfunctional system in which socially excluded localities find themselves.

Eva’s home is a small hill called Birdhill on the outskirts of Bratislava. During her childhood, it was still covered with historic vineyards of Maria Theresa and forest; today’s reality is cranes and excavators. In her film, she gets to know its current inhabitants and discovers that each of them lives and dreams a slightly different version of this charismatic place. Even though they live on the same hill, they cannot come together to set limits on the construction that is transforming their home unrecognizably, ruthlessly and at a breathtaking pace.

A documentary study by Ivan Vojnár featuring people picked at random and famous personalities he has met in the Café Konvikt and other places in Prague. Not unlike figures from a Hrabal story, they represent a very broad range of types— from a mentally handicapped road-sweeper to a philosopher. Each person, even the most seemingly normal, is exceptional in some way. Most speak directly to the camera about their relations, work, simple and difficult problems, democracy, and Czech society in general.

The heroes of the film came together in a theater troupe—Passengers—and together they prepared a play about how they imagine their lives after leaving the children's home where they grew up. However, reality is much more dramatic than theater.

In her documentary on Hungarian-Slovak relations, Vladislava Plancíková focuses on the word "felvidék", which refers to the now non-existent northern part of Austro-Hungary. In a personal collage consisting of the stories of members of her Slovak-Hungarian family and of visual references to historical events, she follows the eventful and today often taboo history of the post-war fate of Hungarians on Slovak soil. The abstract topic grabs our interest not only through the witnesses' testimony, but also by using thre novel technique of animating real objects, including a number of contemporary and modern photographs.

For twelve years, a film crew has been following the lives of four people who appeared in public in November 1989. Musician Michael Kocáb, dissident Jan Ruml, young participant in the National Avenue intervention Kryštof Rímský, and student leader Martin Mejstřík. The period after November opened up new possibilities, opportunities, and chances for everyone. This unique film project captures their search, their wanderings, their resolutions, and their doubts on the path to finding their own place in the turbulent waters of a transforming society.

The story of a Swiss woman and a Czech man, who changed hundreds of lives.