Directing
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?
This film traces the life of Jan Kapr, a prominent Czech composer of the 20th century. A documentary opera with an ambitious libretto and playful and refined editing work, Kapr Code is an unexpected celebration of creativity that shakes up our ideas of biography and pays tribute to the importance of resisting homologation and censorship through art and creation.
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Jan Sikl expertly edits together actual home-movie footage from the 1920s to the 1960s in order to chronicle the history of Czechoslovakia in the 20th century. In eight episodes of 52 minutes, the major events of Czech history, including the Depression, the occupation by the Nazis, World War II, and the rise of communism are depicted through the experiences of real-life Czech citizens. The series reveals that history is the story of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances - not the dry, dull set of names and dates taught in schools. —Susan Doll
For Tomáš the mine is the centre of his life, along with soccer, his kids and the cosy after-work beer. The 44-year-old has worked as a miner for 21 years, until the mine was closed down for economic reasons. Tomáš then re-trains as a coder in the appropriately named educational programme “New Shift”. What he doesn’t know yet is that his new skills alone won’t get him out of the crisis. A film about a tug-of-war with fate and the employment market.
A carefully composed observation of two newsrooms which, in March 2017, were avidly chasing after information about the Czech president’s decision whether or not to run for re-election. Two teams of reporters, one extraordinary event, and two takes on one "objective" piece of news.
When the Okamura brothers left Japan with their mother as children, their grandmother looked after the eldest, Hayato, whilst their mother was ill, whilst Osamu and Tomio spent just under a year in a children’s home. Yet this continuing story of one family gave rise to very different destinies. Their political careers have placed Hayato and Tomio on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. Hayato has dedicated his life to Christian values and the pursuit of consensus, whilst Tomio ‘protects’ the Czech people from a wave of immigrants. The youngest brother, Osamu, who works as an architect, can be found, for example, at a demonstration for the rights of the Roma. The intertwining of the three brothers’ current, often conflicting visions serves as concrete evidence of how personal and social experiences shape the political landscape.
An intimate portrait of a man on the edge of society, filmed over the course of twenty years.
A pig farm in Lety, South Bohemia would make an ideal monument to collaboration and indifference, says writer and journalist Markus Pape. Most of those appearing in this documentary filmed in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, France, Germany and Croatia have personal experience of the indifference to the genocide of the Roma. Many of them experienced the Holocaust as children, and their distorted memories have earned them distrust and ridicule. Continuing racism and anti-Roma sentiment is illustrated among other matters by how contemporary society looks after the locations where the murders occurred. However, this documentary film essay focuses mainly on the survivors, who share with viewers their indelible traumas, their "hole in the head".
Documentary film about Czech actress Lida Baarova, who fell in love with Joseph Goebbels in the 30s.
Eighty-year-old Paul Erling Johnson is a man most people might walk past, never guessing he was once a seafaring adventurer and famous boat designer.
Pavel Abrahám’s football documentary offers 22 different viewpoints of who is watching. At a match between Sparta and Slavia, the filmmakers used 22 cameras to film the spontaneous reactions of various visitors, fans, tourists, VIPs, intellectuals, and security guards over the course of the entire game. This experiment with the Czech Republic’s national sport shows football as a game around which the viewers create a whole range of other, highly diverse games.
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.
Film in hand. Carnival in the global village.
Sonia Maletzová's documentary film portrait follows the legend of the Czechoslovak music scene, rock keyboardist Marian Varga (1947-2017), at the end of his life, when he was diagnosed with a terminal illness. It captures the great introvert and avid smoker during his last performances, when he slowly began to lose his breath.
When the junior ice hockey team from the small town of Náchod, in the Czech Republic, sets off in a bus to Morocco to play the away game in an exchange programme, the players and their coach expect an easy victory and a cultural shock: “bring ear plugs”, the coach suggests them with a touch of undisguised condescendence, so as not to hear the call to prayer early in the morning. Both on and off the ice, Rozálie Kohoutová and Tomáš Bojar’s camera focuses on a few teenagers and their exchanges, simultaneously funny and cruel, in a clumsy English.
