Petr Svoboda

High school teacher Jiří is torn from his solitude and everyday life by an unexpected nighttime visit from his beloved younger sister, former seamstress Růžena. She tells her brother that she has run away from her husband Fanda, a textile merchant, because of his greed and vulgarity. However, Jiří later learns from his other sister, Tylda, that Růžena spent a lot of money and left her husband for a dragoon captain. The captain has now rejected his pregnant lover because he is getting married. Disappointed, Růžena believes that her brother has turned away from her because of her lie, and she decides to take a desperate step...

A satirical mockumentary follows Ľuboš, a conspiracy theorist ostracized after his parents die of COVID-19, who seizes a new opportunity during the Russo-Ukrainian war: hired to probe an assassination attempt on the prime minister, he unearths “hidden truths” beyond mainstream narratives, but his escalating, dangerous beliefs threaten both himself and those around him.

Copying videos illegally on a mass scale is one thing, but making a marketable product out of them is quite another. Just think of the most basic problem: language – your average customer won’t be a polyglot! The answer to that problem all over Central and Eastern Europe was a practice called rychlodabing, or speed dubbing in Czech, which consisted of one sole actor voicing all characters, with the original voices usually still audible beneath. This is how millions of people in the ČSSR encountered many forms of cinema for the first time in the 1980s, and how many foreign words became lodged (in a corrupted fashion) in everyday language. Some expressions (often curse words) were born. That’s popular culture at its liveliest. Video Kings is an oral history monument to the art of rychlodabing and some of its masters, as well as a collective reminiscence from a time of political transformation, and how ordinary people were agents of that change in extraordinary ways.