There are seven Prague-based characters, all in their mid twenties. Each reflects a part of the chaos in our own lives, and the mess in our heads. Almost all of them attempt to forge and sustain “serious” relationships, which in turn become a series of clashes and lead to disappointment, and finally back to loneliness.Read More »
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In an unidentified area of war-torn Eastern Europe, a young boy is sent by his parents to live in safety with his aunt. But she dies unexpectedly, so he sets off on a journey to return home. He roams alone in a wild and hostile world in which only local rules, prejudices and superstitions apply. His struggle for virtually physical survival after the war turns into a battle of a different type. A battle that he doesn’t even realize, a fight with himself, a fight for his soul, for his future.Read More »
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In this movie, TV sets are full of life. If a person is in TV (e.g. because it was filmed on the street) it has a double that’s right in the TV set. This double needs energy from the true character to survive. Each time, the real human watches TV, his Double will pull life energy from him. So there’s a mysterious Death-serial. Many persons die in front of their TV set and nobody knows why. Olda, the main character, is one of the persons, that get more and more weak. He is near death, till Fisarek, the natural healer appears.He teaches Olda how he can resist this magic force and how he can fight it.Read More »
Jiri Menzel of Closely Watched Trains fame directed the sweet little Czechoslovakian comedy/drama My Sweet Little Village. The life’s blood of the titular community is a collective farm. Marian Labuda is the farm’s truck driver, and also the
partner-protector of Janos Ban, who is the village idiot. Like everyone else in the village, Labuda has watched out for Ban and covered up his mistakes, but in recent weeks the situation has become intolerable and Labuda demands a new partner. As Ban prepares to be relocated to Prague, we cut away to various subplots, all of which lead to the same conclusion: the hapless Ban has always been the “glue” that has held the community together. A contrite Labuda heads for Prague to invite Ban to come back home. Originally titled Vesnicko Ma Stediskova, My Sweet Little Village was a 1986 Academy Award “best foreign-language picture” nominee.
~ Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »
At the turn of the 10th and 11th centuries Boleslav’s kingdom fell apart in the fratricidal war between the Přemyslovci and the other clans the main profiteer of this being the German emperor. At that time it seemed as if the Czech state and the lineage of its princes was awaiting its end…” It is with these words that the tale of this film begins, whose narrative is based upon the the play by František Hrubín of the same name.Read More »
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Jan Sverak’s student film Ropaci (Oil Gobblers) became during the 90’s sort of cult movie, some say due to its “ecological message”, but that is just one interpretation. Sverak received a student Oscar for this school film.Read More »
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…Faust was originally intended as a production for the Laterna magika theatre. Svankmajer describes it as a “variety collage” in which elements from Marlowe, Goethe, Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Gounod and the Czech folk puppet play (Kopecky) are all framed by the reality of contemporary Prague… The films hero, an ordinary man in a dirty raincoat, lives in a rundown flat in Prague. Here (as in Conspirators of Pleasure), it is noticeable that Svankmajer avoids any exotic images of “tourist Prague”, preferring nondescript streets and down-at-heel cafes serving nauseous food… Like Alice Faust moves from scene to scene and from one world to another but, this time, also from text to text, with a time out for the occasional cigarette or glass of beer.Read More »
Her first foray into documentary filmmaking was a short called Green Street (1959), a look at an over-loaded freight train departing from Prague. Though only nine minutes in length, Chytilová’s astute editing ensured a visual spectacle.
An early rare documentary by Věra Chytilová!Read More »
Synopsis:
A nurse and her surgeon-lover are part of a resistance movement in 1940s Czechoslovakia. When they are discovered, her lover flees and she must find a place to hide. A patient whose life she saved, a man from a remote mountain village where time stopped 150 years ago, agrees to hide her as his wife.Read More »