Directing
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.
Author's view of the causes and phenomena that are still moving by the Czech public, the authors mediate in a novel and non-publicistic way thanks to new and often unexpected connections.
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.
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“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.
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.
While Ukraine is fighting, how does it affect the rear? For a year and a half, Vitaly Mansky has portrayed his hometown of Lviv, where everyone’s existence is shaped by the Russian missiles’ flight time to their targets.
An original portrayal of a small Czech village where – as the locals put it – an UFO has landed in the form of a kilometre-long silverish factory: a Korean Hyundai automobile plant. The village, hitherto famous mostly for its sauerkraut and the “Radegast” beer was thus turned into an industrial zone – the largest greenfield investment project in the Czech Republic’s history. Nonetheless, for a long time many farmers resisted selling the land upon which the factory was now standing. Eventually, they all succumbed under the pressure from the neighbours, and even the anonymous death threats. The filmmakers returned to Nošovice two years after the dramatic property buyouts, at the time when the factory has just started churning out cheap cars. Combining the perspectives of seven characters, they have composed a portrayal of a place suddenly changed beyond recognition that is playful and chilling at the same time: a politically engaged absurd flick about a field that yields cars.
The troubadour of rap hedonism of the 2010s, who became one of the main voices of protest in the 2020s at the peak of his form.
Working conditions in the worst-paid jobs in the Czech Republic were examined by journalist Saša Uhlová during six months. She spent several weeks in a hospital laundrette, poultry house, cash register or waste sorting facility. Her experience became the basis of a lived and very personal report of invisible employees working in appalling conditions. Uhlová wrote a series of reports on her project that were published on the Alarm website. Apolena Rychlíková made them into a documentary film consisting of scenes shot at Uhlová's home and video footage taken during her work. Uhlová accompanies the picture with read commentary.
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.
An immersion into the intimacy of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR. The architect of perestroika and glasnost, who was praised in the West but reviled in his own country, still combative despite his advanced age, loneliness and illness, offers his personal and political testament.
Everyone knows something like this is happening. But this is the only experiment to fully demonstrate what excessive openness on the internet means. The filmmaking couple hired youthful-looking (but over 18) actresses to pretend to be prepubescent girls and communicate with strangers who approached them based on their fake accounts. They attracted dozens of men in the first ten days, then hundreds, and finally thousands...
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?
Lesya has committed a crime of passion which brings her a seven-year sentence in one of Odesa’s women’s correctional facilities. She has just given birth to her first child, and now she is entering a world populated only by women: inmates, nurses and wardens, women of all ages, wives and widows, daughters, sisters, pregnant women, and women with children too. If not for the color of the uniform, it would sometimes be hard to tell who is who.
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.
A fun and sweet film about a family experiment during the corona crisis. This Czech family explores the accidental adoption of chickens and discovers the challenges inherent in the egg industry, animal rights platforms, and family tensions in times of pandemic.
