IMDB:
A full-length picture based on the famous novel by Daniel Defoe. The picture, unlike the other film adaptations of the story, focuses much more on Crusoe’s life before and after his stay on the island. Following the principle of setting the novel right, it describes Crusoe’s experiences with delicate irony and understanding.
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Some people with a strange cat arrive in a small village. The cat wears glasses, and when someone takes them off, she can colour people, according to their nature and mood. The grown-ups of the village consider the cat to be dangerous, but the kids just love her…Read More »
The Lemuel Gulliver of Dlouhá Street takes an unexpected journey to the flying island of Laputa, in the realm of Balnibarbi, and back again. The parable about a totalitarian system, where bizarre laws are in force and unwritten rules are adhered to, mixes with a fantastical spectacle in which “dreams touch the world and the world touches dreams”. In twelve chapters, the Kafkaesque motion picture, Case for the New Hangman, tells the timeless tale of a foreigner who brings hope and excitement to the stagnant waters of Balnibarbi whereupon, instead of being received as a guest, he is treated with suspicion.Read More »
Bára, the daughter of a communal herdsman, is pursued by all the young men from the village. The parents of the village boys are not pleased with this at all, because they believe the superstitious old women who claim that Bára is a daughter of a noonday-witch. The beautiful girl has one friend, Eliška, foster-daughter of the parish priest. The priest also likes Bára and always takes her side. The manorial administrator Sláma is trying to win Eliška, but Eliška loves a student from Prague. Bára decides to frighten Sláma away from his courtship. She disguises herself as a ghost, scares Sláma to death near the graveyard and makes him promise to leave Eliška in peace. But Sláma’s coachman alarms the entire village and they recognize Bára in the ghost.Read More »
In a remote Slovak village in the closing days of World War II, a schoolteacher and his young wife find a wounded Russian parachutist in their front yard just as the Germans are coming in to occupy their village. As his wife readily becomes involved with anti-Nazi partisans, the schoolteacher collaborates with the Germans in fear.Read More »
About the film
Following his promising debut in the 1960s with the documentaries Moravian Hellas (1963) and Elective Affinities (1968), director Karel Vachek spent the majority of the 1970s and 1980s as a political persona non grata, at times working various blue-collar jobs and at times in emigration, without completing a single film project. He was rehabilitated only following the events of 1989, which permitted him to return to Prague’s Krátký Film studio. The societal events surrounding Vachek’s return to filmmaking in 1990 have much in common with those over twenty years earlier, in 1968, that allowed him to make Elective Affinities. In 1990, Czech and Slovak society was facing its first democratic parliamentary elections since 1945.Read More »
Synopsis:
The invincible agent Cyril Juan Borguette alias W4C (Jan Kacer) has been assigned a mission to go to a hotel in Prague, get hold of a saltcellar with a plan for the military exploitation of Venus hidden in it, and hand it over to the beautiful agent Alice (Kveta Fialová). He will have to compete for the saltcellar with other agents working for the world’s various greater and smaller powers. The head of the Prague counter-intelligence unit gets news of agent W4C’s mission. Deficient in personnel, he nominates accountant Foustka (Jirí Sovák) as agent 13B. Mr Foustka takes his dog Pajda with him and the two head for the airport. Pajda helps him track down agent W4C in a classy hotel that becomes the battleground for the interests and plans of the secret agents from different countries, each trying to get hold of the precious saltcellar.Read More »
Distinguished as being ‘banned forever’ in its native Czechoslovakia, Nemec’s film is a masterpiece of barbed, darkly sinister wit. As a biting satire of governmental and institutional power and with its astute observations of human nature and conformity, it is a film whose relevance continues to this day.
Considered the most politically dangerous film made during the short flowering of the Czech New Wave in the 1960s, this is its first-ever release on DVD.Read More »
Synopsis:
“Everyday Courage” or “Courage for Every Day” is a beautifully made fllm of great poetic restraint about a young man living in Prague before the collapse of communism. It is best described as belonging to the school of realism which marked the Czech films of the sixties, and its director, Evald Schorm, was noted for his refusal to compromise the subject matter or style of his films with the regime which controlled the film studios. An admirer of the films of the British director Lindsay Anderson, “Everyday Courage” has similarities with”This Sporting Life”, its hero striving to escape the repressive forces of a society against which he rebels, but which ultimately demoralizes him and undermines his personal relationships. The winner of the International Film Festival in 1965 it has been notably neglected, and was one of the most moving and lyrical films to emerge from the Czech school.Read More »