Josef Illík
Camera
Known For

Popelka, a resourceful and independent young girl, is a servant in her stepmother's house and confides in her closest friend the owl. When she comes across three magical acorns, she's granted a single wish for each one of them.
Three Wishes for Cinderella

A remake of Vávra's 1948 atomic age thriller Krakatit. Engineer Prokop creates the devastating explosive “Krakatit” and soon confronts manipulative agents and imperialist conspiracies. Realizing his invention’s threat, he fights to prevent its misuse, risking everything to stop those who seek to exploit his epochal discovery.
Dark Sun

It is the 1920's. The good-looking hostess Věra demonstrates household robots to visitors of the Futurum exhibition. Young inventor Petr comes to her rescue when she tries to flee from two men wanting to take her away. Věra confesses that she has fled from home because her father, a factory owner, wanted to profitably marry her off. Petr is fascinated by the emancipated woman and shows her round his laboratory, where he plans to create a robot of his own - but one that would be far more advanced. Věra cuts herself on a broken test-tube and a drop of her blood gets in the solution. In the morning, they are taken aback to see Věra's double. This lucky chance has helped Petr create an artificial being, Miss Golem. She has a single motive for her actions: to take care of Věra and allow her to do only what is good for her.
Miss Golem

A wonderful fairytale about looking for love, defeating evil and learning some valuable moral lessons on the way. The story begins with the young Prince Velen, who is left in charge of the castle and his three sisters. During the night he has a visitation and before he knows it, all his sisters are married off and gone away, and himself falls in love with beautiful Večernice. Now he is faced with the King's wraths and charged with a quest. The journey, however, hides obstacles and danger; not only treacherous merchants and robbers, but also a evil wizard Mrakomor...
Prince and the Evening Star

It is the summer of 1968 and also in South Moravian Pálavice appear political clashes. The so far peacefully farming Unified farmers' cooperative starts splitting. Some of the farmers have found the cooperative called Vidrupa and want to deal with wine in private trade. Michal Janák, chairman of the farmers' cooperative is a deliberate man and refuses the latent return to the capitalism. As an excellent farmer he continues preparing planting out new vineyards. His adversaries do not agree - the returns will come many years later. Jozka Hrdlicka, an émigré, notices on the Austrian TV the interview with the representatives of Vidrupa and decides to visit his native village. The new suit and the hired car transform the bankrupt and criminal to the successful businessman with wine.
Wine Working

The fact that the man succumbed one morning to an irresistible urge to sit down at the piano and play the entire Chopin Sonata in B Minor would not have been so strange if it had not been for the fact that he had never played the piano in his life and he himself had no idea that he could.
Meze Waltera Hortona

In the 1600s, an overzealous clergy hauls innocent women in front of tribunals, forces them to confess to imaginary witchery, and engages in brutal torture and persecution of their subjects.
Witchhammer
A military film of marital infidelity in which furloughs pose danger not only to the army but also to a soldier's family.
Opportunity

A Czech film comedy about the ordinary days of an ordinary Novák family, about the confusion of finding and the winding road to wisdom...
Friday Is No Holiday

Seven days, or rather evenings and nights, in the life of Jenka (Stanislava Bartosová), a young good-looking nurse. Jenka is attractive to men and enjoys their company, but there is a limit beyond which she won't go, since she is faithful to her Filip, who is doing his military service. On Sunday the girl awaits Filip to arrive on a short period of leave, but instead his friend Míla (Frantisek Nemec) turns up and apologizes for Filip, who has to stay in the barracks.
Seven Days in a Week

Government bureaucrat Ludvik becomes suspicious after several colleagues disappear and he overhears something strange at a cocktail party. Returning home with his wife, Anna, he finds their house under surveillance and spends a fraught night worrying about his possible arrest in the morning. Marital difficulties come to light as Ludvik and his wife attempt to act normal in front of the cameras while dredging up their problems out of sight.
The Ear

A film in five episodes, all based on an attempt to show the life of young people today, their feelings and relationships, their behaviour in public and private life.
A Place in the Crowd

The urn supposedly containing the remains of Alice's grandfather falls out of the window and breaks. To Alice's great surprise, the urn is empty and the girl learns that the grandfather didn't die but disappeared under mysterious circumstances on the 2nd September 1946 in the town of Telc. Her grandmother claims that a mysterious young man with dark glasses was implicated in her husband disappearance. Alice is determined to solve the mystery. Grandmother's story leads Alice to a shoemaker who hands her Professor Jeník's - her grandfather's - invention, called the Force-fields Accelerator. Alice tells her boyfriend Petr about the device and the young man creates a time machine following the professor's instructions. The young couple then travel back to 1946 and there they indeed meet Alice's grandfather, and his daughter Blanka, who will later be Alice's mother.
Něco je ve vzduchu

A WW2 story of a young Austrian soldier running from the Russian army and a woman whom he forces to come along in order to save his wounded mate.
Carriage to Vienna

A young Czech boy is freed from a concentration camp and now is working for the army against the Germans.
Slingboy

This Czechoslovakian children’s film takes place during the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The young son of a horse trainer loves nothing more than riding his horse, until he is stricken by polio…
Jumping Over Puddles

Sanin, an aging Russian nobleman, recalls his unfulfilled love for a simple girl with whom he fell in love during his youthful travels, but left her for a short-lived love affair with a selfish high society beauty.
Jarní vody

In the Hussite times, religious truth was sifted even on the tips of weapons. When in 1430 the Hussites set out on a raid to Nuremberg, the so-called Spanila Cavalry, to defend their doctrine, the young commander of the cavalry, the landowner Keřský, whose bride had once been kidnapped by a vicious crusader, saw it as an opportunity for personal revenge. Although Oldřich Daněk has tried to establish a distinctive interpretation of historical events, he reflects on where the blinded desire to punish a bad deed with further cruelty leads, but his version seems too thesis-like and lifeless, it does not rise above the descriptively illustrated scenes from old Czech chronicles...
Spanilá jízda
A young man tries to enter the building of the Mammoth Cybernetic Supermachines Research Institute again and again but each time the doorkeeper spots him and kicks him out. The youth finally arrives with all his friends and a huge live bear from the circus where he works as an accountant. He is finally allowed in where he explains to the members of the directorate that he wants to work at the Institute, since he graduated in cybernetics and, besides, he has invented a machine for forecasting time of death. When the conniving research manager learns that their director is going to die in two days, he hopes to rise to his position.
Lov na mamuta
Based on a real event - the shooting of a group of working-class children on 20 April 1930 in Radotín. Thirteen-year-old Boženka‘s mother works as a laundress, and Boženka and her two younger siblings are not living on a bed of roses.