A more horrific and gloomy version of The Beauty and the Beast. Julie, the youngest daughter of a bankrupt merchant, sacrifices her life in order to save her father. She goes to an enchanted castle in the woods and meets Netvor, a bird-like monster. As Netvor begins to fall in love with Julie, he must suppress his beastly urge to kill her.
Parents of all children around the world held a congress to discuss how to deal with their misbehaving. All parents came together, only one was missing, parents of Silvester, the best boy in the world. The congress decided to go see him so he could lead the other children by example. Silvester was truly an exceptional child, but his “being good at all times and under all circumstances” somewhat got out of hand …
Synopsis: ‘Forty-year old PE teacher Luboš Urna, is a man you’d be unlikely to notice on the street. He is completely average and unremarkable, with nothing interesting or special about him at first glance. Even his life up until now seems completely ordinary; that is, until the beginning of the film. For this is when Luboš, totally unexpectedly and it could be said needlessly, dies. The moment of Luboš’s death is actually the beginning of the story, which reveals how his whole life from birth, through growing up to adulthood was a constant battle to survive in a WORLD where REAL MEN are slowly disappearing and that is more and more dominated by ALL POWERFUL WOMEN. We follow our hero through humorous, dramatic, lyrical and erotic episodes in his life, in many of which it is unclear whether they actually took place or if they are just a product of his turbulent imagination. Both the hero and filmgoers will come to a surprising realization at the end of the film.’
Quote: In one town there lives a little girl named Matylda, who likes to play, but doesn’t like to study – when she has to do, she remembers little. Her mom comes up with the idea to buy her some extra heads: one for Maths, one for poetry and so forth. Matylda gets all her heads together at home and everyone is happy. Until the day when her mother accidentally switches her head for a cabbage when Matylda is to recite a poem for her grandma. The family get-together is huge embarrassment. So Matylda and her mother realize that one head is more than enough.
The rules are merciless: when a police detective kills a jewelry robber in self-defense, he doesn’t get any awards, but gets fired instead. He then keeps on surviving as a taxi-driver, and yet keeps on investigating in his case, which has not been closed even after many years… The film is an unique attempt at an action film in the Czech context.
The Phantom of Morrisville is parody upon cheap crime mystery books. The story takes place on old mysterious english mansion. Its filled with typical pulp fiction characters who are grotesque just by themselves. The Movie starts in theatre where one of the musicians with easy part of Bizets Carmen opera reads crime story and identifies himself with noble Lord Hanibal Morris and his adventure. He is going to be married to beautiful Clarence but she has a terrible secret. Notorious villain Manuel Diaz is about to be executed but with help from his criminal buddys Dixi and Miki he is able to escape at the very last moment. Now he is on his way to Morrisville.
Young music composer Viktor Honzl in vain looks for work. He is prevented from committing suicide by a technician of the gasworks who shortly beforehand has disconnected his gas due to past due bills. In the disguise of an older, serious, musical scholar Viktor obtains work in a music publishing house. So he may court Eva, publisher Durdys’s daughter, who he likes quite a bit, he recommends to the owner that he also employ his nephew. Understandably, this is he himself, in his every-day form. For Viktor, however, this becomes an extremely complicated situation as he switches in the place of business from the clothes of the uncle and then back again from the clothes of Viktor the nephew.
This historical film by Hynek Bočan touches upon the indecisiveness of the Czech nation, ready to bend the backbone in face of foreign rule. Situating the story at the close of the Thirty Year War enabled the depiction of the misery of the people that affects even an impoverished aristocratic milieu. Rudolf Hrušínský appears here in the role of an indecisive knight, persuaded for a long time and in vain to join the anti-Habsburg movement. The story does not only captivate through the depiction of manifold human characters, intrigues and sycophancy, but also through the circumstances ruling over the devastated farmstead, sunk in mud and crudeness. One of the best films with an updating tendency has come into being here, rightly being named along the such greats as Kladivo na čarodějnice (Witches’ Hammer).
Synopsis Somewhat reminiscent of Fassbinder, in particular QUERELLE, with characters appearing as the Angels of Death, this film could be titled HANSEL AND HANSEL. The story comes from the novel by Josef Capek, and is one of Vlacil’s wordiest, more philosophical films, as two young men are caught in the woods by the gameskeeper killing a deer So they kill him as well, still another senseless act, and spend the rest of the film running away, hiding in the woods, plagued by their crimes. The two talk incessantly, pledge to never leave one another, and enter into a homosexual bond which is never actually realized, as they rarely even touch, but they can’t exist without one another. As they get deeper in the woods, memories, fantasies, and hallucinations appear more prevalent.
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.
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.
Quote: …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. In both Alice and Faust, we encounter narratives in which the identity of the central character is unstable and an episodic and serial construction recalling Svankmajer’s short films… Svankmajer’s ignoring certain aspects of classical narrative construction is no different from what Antonioni, Godard, Miklos Jancso, Chytilova and others have done – in each case the audience is, in some way, challenged and required to make an adjustment. In Faust, the narrative is constantly fragmented by the shift from text to text, from opera to folk puppetry, from the “high” to the “low”. As Svankmajer himself puts it, “high and low together create a certain magic”. – Peter Hames – Czech and Slovak Cinema: Theme and Tradition
The film is not so much another version of the Faust legend as, precisely, an exploration of what the legend can reveal to us today. Faust, of course, is associated with Prague and with its alchemical tradition, more precisely with the point at which alchemy starts to go wrong, that is, when it becomes detached from a disinterested quest for knowledge and becomes self-interested… In fact, in Svankmajer’s film, Faust appears to enter into the diabolic pact not from any great desire, but out of boredom: he can’t be bothered to resist and barely protests when the Devil doesn’t keep his part of the bargain. This is partly a comment on the way in which people came to accept Stalinism. We should, however, always remember that for Svankmajer Stalinism was nothing but a particular emanation of the sickness of modern civilization: the fact that consumerism has come to replace Stalinism does not reflect any improvement in the structure of society… It is the will to modify the environment so that is serves human needs that Svankmajer sees the sickness of modern society as essentially residing. From his earliest films, he has been concerned to question the way we tend to try to reduce the world to our own dimensions… – Michael Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema
Quote: 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.
Quote: A wonderful spoof documentary following a team on its quest for the oil gobbler, an animal that has evolved to be the perfect denizen of a polluted world. Loathed by the locals for its voracious habit of eating anything plastic, from wellington boots to the protective sleeves farmers put round their saplings to prevent them being eaten by other animals, the ropaci is an elusive specimen and has the team – and thus the audience – intrigued.
Finally, they catch it on film – and then manage to capture a young one that they want to take back home with them. The perils of their journey from the pollution-ridden Bohemian basin back through the clean, fresh air of the forest prove too much for the little creature and they come up with an ingenious way of saving it.
A student work by Jiří Menzel, filmed during his second year at the FAMU film school. Views of old Prague and its tenement buildings, symbolizing the obsolete past, alternate with shots of construction sites for new prefabricated apartment buildings. In spite of certain unavoidable propagandistic overtones added by the director, it is notable as the beginning of his search for a “dramaturgy of colors.”
“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.
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 Guide
Quote: 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.
Quote: 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.
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.
Robert works for a travel agency and helps to arrange scenes from the everyday lives of “ordinary” Czech families as an attraction for Japanese tourists. He also works as a kind of matchmaker and occasionally helps to put together some of his friends. He helps to separate his friend Hanka from Peter, an announcer for an independent radio station who tries to capture “real” life by recording the moments from “reality” and playing them over the air. Vesna, came to Prague from Macedonia because it is according to her the best place for UFOs to land, but her real reason for coming is somewhat different… Hanka is followed by the crazy Ondrej, until then a respected brain surgeon, and married with two kids. Through him she meets Jacob, who uses copious amounts of weed in order to be constructive in this gloomy world. On the other hand, this destroys his short-term memory – and he forgets that he already has a girlfriend. The disappointed Hanka runs to her parents, only to find some twenty-odd Japanese tourists watching her parents eat their dinner…
THESSALONIKI film festival – Audience award WARSAW film festival – Audience award MANNHEIM film festival – FIPRESCI Award – special jury award CZECH LION – the best second actor – Jirí Machácek
