Hypermarket Film

Two students from the Czech Film Academy commission a leading advertising agency to organize a huge campaign for the opening of a new supermarket named Czech Dream. The supermarket however does not exist and is not meant to. The advertising campaign includes radio and television ads, posters, flyers with photos of fake Czech Dream products, a promotional song, an internet site, and ads in newspapers and magazines. Will people believe in it and show up for the grand opening?

This documentary takes us to Zambia, a country with significant copper reserves. The state used to mine and sell copper itself. Then its price fell and the mines were forced to privatize in favor of Western multinational companies. While the proceeds used to finance schools, healthcare, and infrastructure, today all the money leaves the country, including generous subsidies from the European Investment Bank. Czech documentary filmmaker Ivo Bystřičan and cameraman Jiří Málek come to see what the situation, which seems to be taken straight out of the daily news in the Western world, really looks like. We are used to looking at the so-called Third World through the eyes of passionate activists fighting poverty and all kinds of humanitarian organizations. The Copper Age, on the other hand, soberly shows that we should be more interested in what this "selfless" aid looks like in practice.

From the makers of legendary CZECH DREAM, a hilarious documentary about a hoax hypermarket, comes CZECH PEACE, a new playfully explosive flm about the mayor of a small Czech village and his attempts to foil the American plan to build its 762nd military base right on his doorstep. The players in this story are everyone from villagers to George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, peace activists and lobbyists representing American arms manufacturers. Can the Mayor of Trokavec (population 80) take the US on? CZECH PEACE shows the workings of geopolitics and the way they affect the little people. The personal clashes with the impersonal, the specifc with the universal, and an individual with the so-called great history.

A prominent Czech journalist Saša Uhlová leaves her family and joins “cheap labour force” in Western Europe. Undercover, she works at an asparagus farm in Germany, tries her hand as a maid at a hotel in Ireland and takes care of the elderly in France. She experiences first-hand the struggles of Eastern European low-wage workers whose sacrifice and hard work allow for the Western society’s comfort. What is the real price that Europe pays for exploiting its own citizens? How do the lives of economic migrants, who have been forced to leave their children and elderly parents, look like? And why are privileged Europeans looking the other way?

Part documentary, part mockumentary and part stranger-than-fiction lesson in guerilla tactics, Velvet Terrorists is a quirky profile of three very different men and their former attempts to take down the communist regime of Czechoslovakia – by blowing the hell out of it. Having all spent time in prison for their crimes, one-time bombers Stanislav, Frantisek and Vladimir muse on their personal histories, the fall of the regime and their journey into middle age.

In 2006, Milan and Tomas electrified a school campus and a hospital in a detached Zambian village. After four years, they return for the last time to find out about their system's failures, repair it and hand it over at last. The film follows them through chaotic days as well as pitch black nights and provides a fresh insight into the pitfalls of humanitarian development projects. Short circuits of all sorts, blending and dissolving of different worlds, rituals of gratitude and concepts of solutions. With no attempts to declare or evaluate anything, Solar Eclipse becomes a situation probe examining various forms of light and darkness. Will the two Czech linkboys succeed in lighting up the Zambian bushland?

Vitaly is a nuclear physicist and record-holder in extreme cold-exposure training who now makes a living as a bricklayer, surviving below the poverty line in Novosibirsk. Like the rest of his family, former scientists and members of the old Soviet Elite, he dreams of a return to the great Soviet Union, a fairy-tale country that would eliminate all the injustice from their lives, as the reason for their misfortune lies with the capitalists of the West. For years, Vitaly has expressed his radical opinions on his eccentric video blog.

Over the course of one year, this film follows the life of an ordinary Pyongyang family whose daughter was chosen to take part in Day of the Shining Star (Kim Jong-il's birthday) celebration. While North Korean government wanted a propaganda film, the director kept on filming between the scripted scenes. The ritualized explosions of color and joy contrast sharply with pale everyday reality, which is not particularly terrible, but rather quite surreal.

This cinematic reportage with elements of a personal journal explores xenophobia in Czech society and anti-Nazi activists, but also the filmmaker’s personal experience from living among in an socially excluded Romani neighborhood. Most of the footage was shot by the director using his own camera, and the immediacy of the images is further accentuated by voiceover observations and commentary. In just a few scenes, he adds music for dramatic affect. With his direct questions, he tries to unmask the racist arguments not only of anti-Roma protestors, but also of many ordinary citizens.

Russian Federation, December 31, 1999. After President Boris Yeltsin's unexpected resignation, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin becomes acting president of the country. From that day and for a year, Vitaly Mansky's camera documented Putin's rise to power. The story of a privileged witness. The harsh explanation of the reason why politics is the art of possibility of achieving the best with the support of many, but also of giving the worst in return.

War doesn’t start and end in battlefields; it originates and is buried in peaceful cities. This film delves into the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine, not by focusing on violence, shelling, or the victims, but by reflecting on the military vehicles that either enter or have long been embedded in the lives and minds of people across various countries.

“Most prisoners like boxes.” The constrained nature of prisons opens up an infinitude of fantasies and free artistic expression. Environment determines means of expression. A project of confrontation and dialogue with artists from the outside shows radical diff erences and a conspiratory divergence from social norms. This essay on imaginary and physical freedom introduces us to the extreme thoughts of our own boundaries and limitations.

Incomplete thoughts and fragments of dialogue, diverse music interrupted by rushes and glitches, and the seemingly confused, unanchored camera, create a disturbing, philosophical reflection on the limits of anthropocentric thinking.

Journalist Renata Kalenská’s book of interviews with Vratislav Brabenec, prominent member of the Plastic People group, recorded not only his memories of the underground years, but also the author’s experiences with this highly distinctive individual. The film represents a cinematic sequel to the book, and looks to build on those experiences as it captures additional interviews with Brabenec, mainly improvised talks at places that hold some meaning for Brabenec or Kalenská. The result is several scenes of irrelevant philosophising, self-deprecating humour, and commentary on the life of birds, and on nature in general. The conversations, recorded mostly by hand-held camera, are interspersed with poetic citations.

This episode from the Czech Journal series examines how a military spirit is slowly returning to our society. Attempts to renew military training or compulsory military service and in general to prepare the nation for the next big war go hand in hand with society’s fear of the Russians, the Muslims, or whatever other “enemies”. This observational flight over the machine gun nest of Czech militarism becomes a grotesque, unsettling military parade. It can be considered not only to be a message about how easily people allow themselves to be manipulated into a state of paranoia by the media, but also a warning against the possibility that extremism will become a part of the regular school curriculum.

Dalibor K. is an industrial painter, amateur horror maker, the composer of angry songs, painter and a radical neo-Nazi. He is approaching 40, but he is still living with his mother Vera, Aged 63, and is yet to experience the real relationship with a woman. He hates his job, gypsies, Jews, refugees, homosexuals, Merkel, spiders and dentists. He hates his life, but he doesn’t know how to change it.

On February 24, 2022, Yevhen, together with his friends, volunteered to join the first aid squad on the front line. They provided life-saving support and evacuation of the wounded. This film reveals the experiences of these young men for six months full of drama, despair, fear, hatred, bitterness, love, and, most importantly, faith in victory.

Young married couple Radek and Johana are considering adoption. In order to weigh up the possible risks, they gatecrash a meeting of their contemporaries who grew up in adoptive families and contacted each other via internet chat rooms. A group of thirty-somethings get together at a campsite for a few days in order to set up an association in support of adoption. Despite their shared fate and "noble” intentions, the members of this small community don’t hit it off. Where does pretentious tolerance end and buck-passing indifference begin? And what has decent morality got in common with xenophobia? As an ironic reflection that questions how prepared we should be to help each other out, the film offers a sophisticated and poetic take on the grimly authentic style of the Dogme 95 Manifesto. This satirical comedy was the result of collaboration with the LÁHOR/Soundsystem theatre group, which focuses on realistic collective stage improvisation within the structure of a predetermined story.