Josef Žluťák Hrubý

At the beginning was the Slovak television series Lekár umierajúceho czasu (Doctor of Dying Time), dedicated to the Rudolphine-era scientist Jan Jesenius. He ended up on the scaffold along with other gentlemen after losing the anti-Habsburg uprising. When director Miloslav Luther conceived the idea of making an abridged version of the footage for cinema, he had to not only rebuild the storyline but also dub it into Czech. However, the result was only an illustrative puzzle, describing the various stages of the hero's turbulent life.

In the 1950s, Ludvik Jahn was expelled from the Communist Party and the University by his fellow students, because of a politically incorrect note he sent to his girlfriend. Fifteen years later, he tries to get his revenge by seducing Helena, the wife of one of his accusers.

During WWII a youth deserts his country's army after a combat experience, but not before wounding his commanding officer with a knife in order to escape. The young man, now very emotionally distraught, dresses in women's clothes and eventually joins a passing gypsy caravan, who think him a young girl... as well as a kind of seer, or 'rawney'. In time, however, he regains some composure and becomes attracted to one of the gypsy girls, which only leads to problems within the gypsy band, especially when the wounded commanding officer finds him.

Her mother dead, 18-year-old Vladka travels to a remote village in the dead of winter to find the father she has never met. The happiness of their initial meeting gives way to the daughter’s disappointment and concern over the hardworking man’s alcoholism.

Two different productions of Václav Havel's Beggar's Opera reveal the political dynamics of Czechoslovakia before and after the velvet revolution.

This wacky musical comedy builds on absurd ideas, parodic humour and many variously subverted references to famous...

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A story of a young student of medicine, who arrives in a small mountain village after being accused for carrying out illegal abortion. The film reflects the moral decline of the society, where stealing in secret and making compromises against one's beliefs make up mundane reality. The filmmakers went to perhaps the furthest possible limits in terms of allowed social criticism in the 1980s. The negative picture is enhanced by its rural setting, since the Slovak village had been traditionally associated with strict morals and conservative values.

Amadeus Macků, the village postman, is an incorrigible dreamer obsessed with the desire to fly. He invents and builds his own hovercrafts, making himself a thorn in the side of his hillbilly neighbours. The group of pub chatterers are particularly annoyed by the wooden runway that the stubborn postman builds for his next experiment. But the guileless weirdo catches the eye of the local doctor, who has an acquaintance with a slick doctor from the big city...

Young, inexperienced heroes, the Roma girl Darja and the "white" boy Vítek, nicknamed Ken by his friends, fall in love at a drunken dance with the intensity of their first adolescent love, unaware of the world they live in and how a mere name or skin color can arouse hatred and a desire for revenge in others.

We meet Veronica shortly before her high-school graduation exams. She lives with her mother, an alcoholic, and her mother's partner. One day when he is drunk, he chases Veronica to the roof of a house and falls off, killing himself. He was in debt as he was addicted to gambling. His creditor wants the money back and starts to threaten Veronica. Her mother will not protect her since she is always drunk. Thus, the young girl must leave home and hide far away. On her journey she meets many characters. Some of them are comic, others are rather tragicomic. And Veronica tries to find good people with whom she would feel comfortable and happy, thus giving her life meaning. - Czech film center

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The lead character is a young woman who becomes close with a colleague of her husband. She finds herself at an important crossroad in life and considers whether to take a decisive step.