Czech Republic

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This acerbic biographical comedy subtitled “I Think You Should Calm Down, Ladies…!” is loosely inspired by the life of renowned photographer and celebrity Jan Saudek, outstandingly portrayed by Karel Roden. The film, appealing in its theme and treatment, focuses on the maestro’s relationships with women, specifically the devoted Líba, who enjoys subtle yet complete control over Jan (her character is undeniably inspired by his former partner Sára Saudková). In addition to numerous indelicate scenes, the brief flashbacks also reveal Jan’s ill-fated past (conflicts with the police and state security agents, a nightmare from his childhood), and there’s also room for staging Saudek’s famous photographic nudes, for which the models were usually morbidly obese. Pavlásková also exposes the artist’s quirky personality, where exhibitionism and vanity go hand in hand with Saudek’s fragility and male naivety, and his desire to extricate himself from his private solitude.Read More »

A biographical film looking back at the life, work and significance of the genius of world cinema. It reveals the inspiration sources of his work and looks into the kitchen of the film tricks pioneer. As an absolute solitaire in his field, he created his own world based purely on his imagination. He was a complete autodidact and is therefore not easily classifiable into any film wave or direction. This extremely hardworking, resourceful man and a perfectionist, yet always preserving the ability to see the world from a child’s perspective is without any doubt one of the most successful and celebrated Czech filmmakers in the world. Thanks to their inner poetry and sincerity, his films do not age.Read More »

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Vera Chytilova’s fascinating 1962 film-school thesis is a protofeminist meditation on the fashion industry that draws on Chytilova’s experience as a model. The storytelling is a bit clumsy, arbitrarily juxtaposing scenes of the protagonist posing at a photo shoot and awkwardly interacting with some young men in a cafe. But many of the images ring emotionally true, even those that have since become cliches—like the sequence in which she wanders the street at night staring at shop window mannequins. The film’s best scene—of the model standing on the runway while the audience whirls vertiginously about—evokes the vacuous instability of a self that exists only in the gaze of others.Read More »

Synopsis:
A ballad of love, hatred, and desire to escape from loneliness. The story of a reclusive potter, who returns, years after being shunned by his village.
The story is a simple one, set in medieval times, in a small village near the Tatra mountain range bordering Slovakia and Poland. Where a potter named Martin Lepiš (Czech actor Radovan Lukavský, perfectly cast here in the role of an outsider), whom the villagers refer to as Dragon, returns, several years after he was wrongfully driven away for crimes he did not commit. He comes back not for revenge or any motive other than to simply live his old life in peace. However his former fiancée Eva (Emília Vášáryová, wonderfully expressive in an almost silent role), is now married, and her new husband Simon (Gustav Valach) and the other villagers, are suspicious of Dragon’s intentions. Is there anything he can do to gain acceptance and respect, or is it a hopeless cause?Read More »

Description:

Two teenage girls, both named Marie, decide that since the world is spoiled they will be spoiled as well; accordingly they embark on a series of destructive pranks in which they consume and destroy the world about them. This freewheeling, madcap feminist farce was immediately banned by the government.Read More »

The outrageous Baron Munchausen tells of his many adventures, from meeting the Man in the Moon to defeating a Turkish army all by himself.Read More »

A horrifying, surrealist version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” directed by the masterful animator Jan Svankmajer.Read More »

Synopsis:
In this 1976 character study by Czech director Frantisek Vlacil, a stout middle-aged physician whose marriage has come apart (Rudolf Hrusinsky) establishes a practice in a small town. Gradually he’s drawn into the lives of his patients—a childless couple, a pregnant girl with a stern mother, the son of a duck farmer—and each relationship reveals a bit more about him and the idyllic but insular community. Vlacil is hardly known for his light touch, but the film’s austere look and elegiac chamber music, at times Bressonian in their severity, convey the doctor’s quest for fulfillment and peace of mind. Hrusinsky, who was blacklisted in Czechoslovakia for his anticommunist stance, ennobles his role by underplaying it.Read More »

A man sits down to watch a football match, which seems to consist of the players being violently mutilated in various inventive ways. The players then leave the football pitch and invade the spectator’s flat…Read More »