A joint work of three debuting directors. It is a film about former rock musicians, members of a banned rock band. The friends were forced to replace their ideals by settled family lives and ordinary jobs. When their former lead singer has to go to hospital for therapy, they get an unexpected opportunity to play together again and recall the old times. The day when all needs to be arranged for the performance is full of small lies, compromises, and morally doubtful decisions.Read More »
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”Blind Loves,” which world-premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Fest, is a film about love between blind people. Love can be soft, love can be silly, love can be blind at all times. To find ones place in this world is not an easy thing to do for people with good sight, but how much more difficult can it be for somebody who is blind The view of blind persons is often pure and essential, and very often witty. It uncovers new dimensions of meaning of happiness.Read More »
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Bittersweet comedy about opression of poor Slovakian people by Austro-Hungarian aristocracy.
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A funny outlaw tale inspired by traditional folk humour. Pacho is no ordinary outlaw. He detests injustice and feudal oppression and he copes with each troublesome situation with the help of his cleverness and wit.Read More »
Marek has no real friends except his guard dog and hangs out with skinheads. When his dispirited mother reappears in his life, Marek faces a horrible predicament. An authentic and hypnotic chronicle of a sluggish existence always on the verge of explosion.Read More »
The story of a woman fighting for her son. Many years ago she abandoned him for her career. Now she is coming out of rehab determined to rectify something for which she has lacked the courage for years.
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One of the lead characters is Maria, an inn keeper; always a bride but never a wife. She meets the newcomer Pierre, who disturbs the peace of the small village and teaches the locals how to enjoy life. The film is full of fireworks of lovely colours, and a warm feeling. It is like a carousel of humour and human situations that carry us away, from the very first frame to the unexpected ending, making the viewer laugh gaily. Using a mosaic approach to the traditional narrative line, the film director creates a picture of fairly anarchic glee. “Celebration in the Botanical Garden” is a world of fantasy, full of summer fun, good humour and delight. E. Havetta´s debut was inspired by naïve art, French impressionism, and silent slap-stick as well as Western Slovakian folk traditions.Read More »
Three soccer fans are determined to do literally anything to get to the soccer match between Czechoslovakia and the famous representation team of Brazil. Reaching their goal to see the dream match live cannot be precluded neither by a sudden work task nor family obligations. However, there is one more obstacle in their way: for some time, their enthusiastic behavior during soccer matches has been monitored by the police. This time, it will not be easy for them to get to the stadium.Read More »
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Slovak director Juraj Jakubisko is often described as the Fellini of Eastern Europe. After the 1968 film The Deserter and the Nomads, he was put in exile in Czechoslovakia after the soviet invasion. With cooperation from a Paris film studio he made this film. Birds Orphans and Fools is a brilliant, surreal and underrated tragic comedy that not many people seem to know about. The story is about three orphans who have lost their families in war. Although the two men Andrej and Yorick and the lady Marta are adults, they act foolish like children trying to live life to the fullest. They resort with their landlord and other orphans in an apartment that is distorted with various shelves, cupboards and animals scattered about. But the main characters can’t block out the pain of living in a war torn country, and after Yorick is put in prison and returns a year later, things will never be the same. Towards the end the climax becomes maybe one of the most tragic in cinema history. This was the first film in Jakubisko’s trilogy of Happiness. If you enjoyed Jodorowsky’s Fando & Lis or Vera Chytilova’s Daisies, you have to see this film.Read More »
A student, Oldrich “Fajolo” Fajtak, has a romantic attachment to two girls: his hometown love Bela, and Jana – a lover whom he meets during a summer job on a collective farm. One storyline of the film peels layers off Bela’s permanently tense home life marked by her blind mother’s helplessness, her father’s past break with his father who lives in the village where Fajolo is finding some consolation in the arms of his new lover Jana. As Fajolo begins to pry into Bela’s grandfather’s secrets, she, in turn, allows her new boyfriend Peťo to read and deride Fajolo’s remorseful letters from the farm. This lovers’ triangle provides the film with several oppositions: town and country, intelligentsia and worker, collective and personal truth in communist Czechoslovakia. The potential symbolism of the film appeared ominous to the Communist authorities bent on banning the film, but the nascent political thaw helped the filmmakers prevail and the release of “The Sun in a Net” became its harbinger in Czechoslovak film and culture.
Stanislav Szomolányi’s location cinematography and Ilja Zeljenka’s musique concrète score remain striking.Read More »