Vít Janeček

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This film essay about mushrooms and their connections to other living things tries to use the structure of mushrooms to explain nature, science, and civilization, all the while searching for various analogies, such as the similarities between mycorrhiza and other structures.

Prague faces the challenge of a new zoning plan. The city's development leads to conflicts between the private developer lobby, city residents, and elected officials. By following several years of town council meetings, the film paints an image of a public policy apparatus that ignores the role of the urban planner. Using a journalistic approach, the filmmaker attempts to depict all points of view, although in the end the dominant perspective is of those who believe in the city as an expression of culture and quality of life.

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What impact do the Olympic Games have on their host cities? Athens, Tokyo, Beijing and Paris – cities that have changed the urban layout of entire neighbourhoods for the Olympics, transforming their appearance forever. Unused sports stadiums are falling into disrepair and grass is growing over them, while public attention is focused on the construction of new stadiums costing billions, displacing thousands of residents who have to make way for them. The director travels to Olympic host cities to explore this unsustainable cycle, which has a devastating effect on the city's economy, the environment, and the lives of ordinary people.

Fifty-something former miner Jaroslav has always dreamt of a career as a race car driver. In a congenial and jovial manner, he represents not only the charms and struggles (especially economic) of southeastern Moravia, but also the ever more visible chasm between city and countryside. An uncommonly charismatic portrait of a man struggling with the traumas of the past who, with disarming directness, clings to the promise of good luck and a dignified life alongside a new partner.

Our era is marked by the transformation of social institutions, with universities central to Euro-American civilisation’s development. Despite past persecution, universities have become bastions of free thought and knowledge, crucial to democratic culture. However, commercialisation and massification have introduced challenges affecting teaching, research, self-governance, and the system overall. How do universities maintain academic freedoms, and what are the consequences of their failure? Can we identify and address these challenges?

Zawana enters a Burmese monastery filled with the misgivings and uncertainty that come in part with the inexperience of youth. When the superior, U Dahma, falls ill, the youngster takes up an unexpected challenge. This sensitive film, enhanced by its unique setting, was made in a Burmese-Czech coproduction.

Film in hand. Carnival in the global village.

There are nearly twenty thousand species of them, they have been on Earth for hundreds of millions of years, and they play an indispensable role in many ecosystems. Yet lichens are usually overlooked. Ondřej Vavrečka decided to take a closer look at these fascinating organisms. His view, like the accompanying dialogue between experts Trevor Goward and Curtis Randall Björk, is both scientific and contemplative. For him, lichens represent not only a form but also a way of life. They show that an alternative to the constant expansion and reshaping of the environment can be the establishment of symbiotic communities in which every life has equal weight.

The film gives a complex insight into the gap in political reality of Slovakia - one of the EU countries - which became visible after an investigative journalists Ján Kuciak and his fiancée has been brutally murdered at their home. Following mass demonstrations led to substantial changes in the country's government, but the film doesn't follow history, but much more the universal processes behind the curtain. Journalists, (ex?)-officers of secret services, lawyers and analysts helps to reveal detective story in search of whom ordered to murder a journalist and an innocent girl. But main concern of the film is to reflect mechanisms of oligarchy and mafias (including the Italian) to blackmail key players of the system, to influence public perception and to penetrate police, judiciary and the government in their efforts to rule the country in the ways leading to their profits.

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After a painful divorce, 50-year-old Nadia finally finds a good flat for reasonable price for her and her daughter. Too good to be true, and soon, albeit too late, she comes to understand the reason for the bargain. Her close neighbour in the house is mentally ill Valika who terrorises everyone around her. Piussi’s film creates a string of absurd encounters with increasingly menacing effects, but it is – at its core – a fantastically precise film about humanism, its consequences, its possible limits.

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A documentary based on the mutual experiences of a trio of directors, which portrays life in the border village of Bystré during the last year of the millennium. The film concentrates on the exuberant social life of the community, including many bizarre recent customs, as well as on several very intimate moments in the lives of the inhabitants.

A documentary about the spiritual experience of a girl on Mount Zvir in Slovakia. On the afternoon of August 5, 1990, three children aged 10, 11, and 7—Ivetka, Katka, and her brother Miťko—were playing in a clearing on Mount Zvir, in the Lubovnianska Highlands in northeastern Slovakia. Suddenly, strange sounds began to echo from the surrounding forest, growing closer. The children hid in a nearby hayloft, but the sounds did not stop; on the contrary, they grew closer and closer, without anything being visible. The children's fear intensified. They thought to pray and prayed, "Mary, our Mother, hide us under your cloak..." Suddenly, everything stopped, and the Virgin Mary was sitting on a bench in the hayloft. Both girls saw her.

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In a remote spot in the Eastern European countryside, far from the reach of the state, marshy earth is plowed, homemade wine tasted, and hunting rifles prepared—all meticulously observed by a slow-moving camera. From clearing construction waste to slaughtering a pig: the existential dimension of life here can be detected in almost every activity. This is a world that feels stable, yet always on edge, as if the structure could collapse at any moment.

One of the most striking contemporary Czech film-makers and literary figures, twice over winner of the Magnesia Litera Award, Martin Rysavý, is himself the central character of his new, philosophically tinged travelogue. He takes part in the Ukrainian Maidan, takes the Trans-Siberian Express across Russia, sails down the Kolyma river, comes across nomadic reindeer herdsmen, soldiers, mystics, artists and scholars. He tries to comprehend the present situation of two feuding countries of the former Soviet empire. The film's framework forms the director's conversation with a Prague optician, Jakub Thuri, shot during the director's check-up. Using travel materials on top, it allows a peep inside a traveller's consciousness wandering in recollections and trails of sensory perceptions from expeditions to far-away lands and finding a way how to grasp them, put them in order and pass them on.

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