Synopsis:
In 1900, Stepha, the vivacious 30 year old daughter of a wealthy couple, agrees to marry her cousin Paul, who has accumulated large debts as an Austrian army officer. Paul refuses to work or to consummate the marriage, and then his health steadily declines.Read More »
A black comedy about a dull, overweight middle-aged clerk with a beautiful wife, who has requested that the marriage is not consummated for some time. When he discovers that she has a married lover, he has thoughts of a double murder, suicide and blackmail.Read More »
Based on the true life of Olga Hepnarová, a young Czech woman who became a rampage killer in 1973.Read More »
The screenplay (Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder inspired a theatre production by Dusan David Parízek. The screenplay and the production in turn inspired the film ODPAD MESTO SMRT (Waste, City, and Death) by Jan Hrebejk. Romi (Gabriela Mícová), a prostitute, is anything but successful at her job: she is of far too gentle a nature for her clients. The more obstinately she is pushed to the streets by her pimp Franz (Stanislav Majer), the closer she is to a complete breakdown. One day Romi is addressed by a property speculator referring to himself as a “wealthy Jew” (Martin Finger). He does not demand any sexual services of her. Read More »
Vlasta and Tonda don’t have much longer to live but they do have one more important task ahead of them – to find and kill the communist prosecutor who sent them to prison in the 1950s. An unusual road movie about two former political prisoners who fight for justice despite every obstacle.Read More »
Sin of God was made as a studio exercise by the world-famous Polish-born director Agnieszka Holland (born 1948) during her studies at FAMU in Prague. The plot is based on Isaac Babel’s short story The Sin of Jesus. – A young maid Arina (Jaroslava Pokorná) has a love affair with a peddler Serega. She is even pregnant with him for the second time. She doesn’t take care of the twins from her first pregnancy, she gave them to a foundling. Her lover, however, has to enlist. The inexperienced mother does not know how to fulfil her sexual and emotional desires during Serega’s absence. So she consults God. He sends her an angel, Alfred, with whom she cannot conceive. But this is not the end of the woman’s troubles, rather the beginning.Read More »
THE GOLDEN FERN (ZLATÉ KAPRADÍ) – 1963, NFA, 115 min. Czech director Jiří Weiss’s breathtaking B&W fairy tale is one of the most unjustly neglected treasures of 1960s fantasy filmmaking, a hauntingly lyrical work with overtones of Wojciech Has’s THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT, František Vláčil’s MARKETA LAZAROVÁ and Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. A handsome young shepherd (Jean Marais lookalike Vít Olmer) stumbles across a magical golden fern in the forest. A stunning, enigmatic forest fairy named Lesanka (Karla Chadimová) is sent to retrieve it but instead falls hopelessly in love with him. When he’s forced to join the army and heads off to war, she sews a seed from the fern into his shirt to protect him.Read More »
Quote:
This is unimaginable today, but on Saturday 16 January 1982, BBC2 showed an ultra-obscure subtitled Czech film in an early enough slot (9.35pm) to garner a decent-sized audience – “decent-sized” equating to “many times larger than BBC4’s wildest dreams”, given that Britain had only three television channels at the time (for the record, it was up against Match of the Day on BBC1, and the small-screen premiere of Capricorn One on ITV, a somewhat sci-fi heavy night). Read More »
