Josef Vondráček

A commemorative and essayistic meditative piece on the Prague quarter Libeň during the 1950s.

No synopsis available yet.

Biography of Karel Čapek.

A parable for the end of totalitarianism. Three protagonists - a high official, a secretary, and a border guard - representative of three generations (1948, 1968, 1988) are forced to confront their ideals and places in society through the events of one strange night.

No synopsis available yet.

In the fifites the 10 year old boy Honza lives with his single mother in Prague. The mother is a dedicated communist in the beginning but she changes her mind when a show trial is held. She speaks about her dissatisfaction with the government and is immediately arrested. Honza is given to another family.

The hero of the story is a forty-something intellectual, a sensitive composer of classical music. His exclusive profession, his work, which is actually incomprehensible to those around him, and his deep inner passion set him apart from the conformist milieu. Therefore, he tries to search for the "lark's silence" - a new strength, purity, truth, essence and roots of Czechism. However, on his return from the oppressive, alienated big city to his native village, to his former home, to nature, a deep disillusionment awaits him: he discovers that the once idyllic village has lost not only its face, but also any manifestation of spiritual life in its foolish attempt to resemble the city.

Francin, manager of a small-town brewery, has a charming wife whose abundant blonde locks are an adornment to the town. Maryska looks ethereal but loves meat and beer, while Francin is an ascetic. The strict members of the brewery board of directors come to audit the accounts, but are diverted from concentrating on Francin's detailed reports by Maryska, who has organized a pig-killing feast and is ably assisting the butcher. When she invites the old curmudgeons on the board to enjoy the fresh pork, they are too happy to agree. Francin doesn't know whether he is going to get a permanent contract. To make things worse his brother Pepin - eccentric, noisy and garrulous - turns up on an indefinite visit.

The movie's main storyline follows the life of Otík, a young man, in a tight-knit village community. The sweet-tempered Otík works as an assistant truck driver with Mr. Pávek, his older colleague and practical-minded neighbor. Pávek's family takes care of Otík, whose parents are dead. However, the two coworkers become at odds over Otík's inability to perform even the simplest tasks. Pávek demands that Otík be transferred to assist another driver, who happens to be a choleric and suspicious man named Turek (Turk in Czech). Rather than work with Turek, Otík decides to accept an offer of employment in Prague, but finds he does not fit in to the city life. After discovering that the transfer of Otík to Prague was a trick by a crooked politician to get a deal on Otík's large inherited house, Pávek agrees to give Otík a second chance and retrieves him from the city to resume their work together.

Funny banter about love, sex, social status, and other ideals, while a new railway employee is trained and sent on his first run as driver.

No synopsis available yet.

Set in Prague during the years leading up to World War II, this family saga tells the story of a cobbler named Vincenc Bursik (Vladimir Mensik), who uproots his clan from the country to the city, only to suffer the loss of his wife and the failure of his shoe business within months. When his daughter moves away to go live with a wealthy businessman as his mistress, Vincenc is left to take care of his two sons, who spend their days in a secret garden vying for the affections of a teenage girl.

The small group of actors have to face many problems while preparing a new performance.

A story about an everyday life of an inflectional department of Prague hospital.

A Czech psychological film about the school of life, its sorrows and beauties. The main character is a young aspiring nurse Marie Sahulová, who, after a trouble in the hospital - she secretly brought a boy to her boarding school - is transferred to a rural health centre, where together with an old doctor and a peculiar nurse she has to travel around twenty-five villages and a number of solitudes in the harsh environment of the neglected villages of the 1950s. The nurse, a wise and experienced woman whom no one calls anything other than "babi", becomes her guide, who introduces her to the practice and the pitfalls of private life in a distinctive way. In the mosaic of everyday worries and more or less serious medical interventions, Marie matures and finds the meaning of her work and life.

Leo Popper is a happy family man living in rural Bohemia in the years preceding the Nazi invasion. Out of economic necessity he moves with his family to the big city and becomes an enterprising vacuum cleaner salesman. There he embarks on a series of adulterous adventures, has encounters with boxing pros and famous portrait artists, and schemes to purchase the perfect pond to fulfill his passion for fishing. When the Nazis gain control, the comedy turns sour - he loses his lake, his job, and finally, his family.

The popular Moravanka brass band performs at the fair. Vasek Pivoňka, the bandleader of the local brass band Kulatěnky, which broke up, decides to put the band back together. The village musicians are sceptical at first, but later they start rehearsing with vigour. Standa, a Prague resident who is working in a pig farm to cure his nerves, helps them to organise the concert. He really likes Evica Kocourková, but her father keeps an eye on her. Young Šišák tries to charm the teacher Olina. Before the performance can begin, the band must succeed before the cultural committee. However, they fail to do so. The disappointed musicians play for themselves at the station and suddenly they are successful. Standa comes up with an idea how to push Kulatěnka through without the permission of the commission. A concert of Moravanka is being prepared in nearby Nechvalin.

A few weeks in the life of the family of an attractive woman, the TV presenter Magda, her second husband and her teenage son. Magda is a lively, energetic woman, not for nothing is she called "the boss" at home. Besides her profession, she handles other problems with aplomb. Her dream is to finally move from her small apartment to her self-built villa on the river and to make it by Christmas Eve. But everything is unpredictable and sometimes life finds its own ways.

Rock concerts used to be suspicious. They were supposed to attract all sorts of strange individuals who meant no good. In this case, it's a pair of escaped convicts who want to hide in the heat of the concert...

No synopsis available yet.

No synopsis available yet.

A professional card player and swindler, Icharev, arrives in a small town with a plan to rip off some local jackdaw if possible. However, a trio of local, experienced swindlers have the same plan. They want to play cards with Icharev, but they immediately recognize each other's personalities. The fun continues, but the group regrets that they have no one to play with. There is a local landowner, Glov, but he avoids cards like the devil. And yet he is waiting for two hundred thousand rubles from the bank for the sold piece of land. Of course, the gentlemen will not miss their chance... A recording of a theatrical production by the Drama Club in Prague.

The little mermaid rescues a prince from drowning and falls in love with him. To be with him, she makes a deal with the evil sorceress: her beautiful voice against a life on land.

Wartime events from a child's perspective were a popular theme during the previous regime - here it is a twelve-year-old village boy who experiences dangerous situations with retreating Nazi troops in picturesque South Bohemia... Any attempt to achieve a more believable depiction is destroyed by the staging's grandeur, and in the end the result is an awkward piece, suitable at most for celebrating the relevant national holidays. A longer copy with a tragic ending is stored in the NFA. Milda is shot unnoticed by an SS major.

It doesn't help to have an exacerbated situation like a family losing their only son - killed in a motorcycle accident. His parents, however, don't know the girl who survived, now being treated at a local hospital. Especially the honest and principled father, presented as a model worker and responsible official, cannot come to terms with her superficiality and carelessness, with her dubious life values...

The merging of reality with legend, the image of reality (Ruthenian Verkhovyna in the 1920s) and its reflection in people's minds - this is what characterizes the story of the modern Transcarpathian bandit Nikola Šuhaj, who "took from the rich and gave to the poor". Ivan Olbracht's novel from the 1930s, one of the artistic peaks of modern Czech prose, is a dramatic story about a war deserter, his love for the beautiful Eržica, a story about revenge for wrongs, persecution, betrayal and death. Šuhaj's fate merged with legends in people's memory. By combining elements of the past and the present, document and myth, the story turned into a ballad about how eternal and strong the human dream of freedom and happiness is.

An only son, Jirí Valenta (Jaromír Hanzlík), has been drafted to the army. At the barracks he acquires the nickname Seamstress because he sews rugs in his spare time. One day, his friend introduces him to Julka Vávrová (Jorga Kotrbová), a girl he is desperate to get rid of. The naive Jirí falls in love with the girl and accepts her invitation to spend Easter together in the country. There he learns that the girl is the single mother of the young boy Martínek, whose father is the married tractor driver.

The short story film follows the fate of three young men who will soon have to decide what to do with their lives. The first "Poet", an aspiring author, publishes his first poem, while the sporting career of the second "Rep", a national table tennis player, is disrupted by a maths repartee. The last "Beaver Grizzly" is a tramp more used to solitude, yet he starts a pioneer troop...

An ambitious girl is hired by a group of thieves as a maid in the apartment of a famous actress. The thieves thus prepare the ground for a sophisticated robbery of rare furs and jewels. The girl is tyrannized by the actress and gradually looks behind the scenes of her marriage. After Blanche is murdered, Julie decides to get everything - jewels, furs and property...

A section of the life of George of Poděbrady from his coronation to his death (1458–1471), creating a portrait of a remarkable monarch whose name shone as a symbol of Czech statehood, as a symbol of a victorious military leader and a prudent statesman; a powerful, complex and contradictory personality in the midst of a very dramatic fifteenth century. During thirteen years of independent rule, he wanted to defend with all his might what had been won by the Hussites; he wanted to defend it even in a time and environment that, on the contrary, wanted to settle accounts with the Hussites. It was during this tense time that Poděbrady's idea of ​​creating an association of monarchs who would resolve conflicts through agreements and treaties, and not through war, arose. Even as a father, he made a sacrifice for his beloved country when he did not hand over the crown of the Czech king to his son, but to the Polish king Vladislav, the "Prince of Peace".

No synopsis available yet.

The historical television play was written based on Vančura's Pictures from the History of the Czech Nation and takes place against the backdrop of the European situation at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Přemysl Otakar I., father of Agnes of Přemyslid, sought recognition of the Czech lands as a hereditary kingdom. And what about his love and fickleness? The story will answer this, in which poetry and truth diverge only in the degree of emotional movements, in the tremors of souls, which lead to love as well as to hatred.

It’s a hot holiday season in the city and Alena is pretty much left to her own little self, fantasizing and running her personal daily rituals, keeping most people at a safe distance, yet trying to get male attention.

At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Oblivious to the war and the resistance that surrounds him, this young man embarks on a journey of sexual awakening and self-discovery, encountering a universe of frustration, eroticism, and adventure within his sleepy backwater depot.

Mr. Benda, a married father of two children, works for a company that liquidates old banknotes. After one drunken party, he is visited by a painter who tattooed his back in drunkenness the previous night. The image tattooed on Benda’s back is considered the painter’s best work by the professionals.

A young Czech boy is freed from a concentration camp and now is working for the army against the Germans.

Engineer Jan Sebek (Jan Kacer) is undergoing treatment in a mental home after his unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide. His therapist, via discussions both with the patient and with people who know him, tries to find out what made the young and seemingly satisfied man decide to end his own life. Jan's pretty wife Jana (Jana Brejchová) claims not to know about anything but she is conducting an affair with a family friend, almost publicly and with the blessing of her parents.

Based on a novel by Maria Majerova, this well-photographed but routine romantic drama is directed and co-scripted by Vaclav Krska. Set in a more old-fashioned time, the story centers around Lenka (Suzana Fisarskova), a young woman with a domineering, psychologically abusive father. When Lenka falls in love she suffers the ultimate injustice when her father and her family forbid her to marry the man. They see no advantage in such a union and want her to marry a wealthy local landowner instead, for obvious reasons. But Lenka is not as submissive as they think and she runs away to the city to look for the man she loves -- only to find a serious problem, though a surmountable one, is waiting for her.

A group of outcasts, including a vagabond and a prostitute, gather at the outskirts of the industrial area of a large Czech city, one of the things that helps some of them survive is alcohol.

The protagonist (Rudolf Hrusinsky) is a dull, fat, shy government clerk indulging in voyuerism and ego fantasies. In love with another clerk (Kveta Fiolova), he is urged on in his pursuit by a commiserate executive. The story is told in a flashback sequence as the cuckolded Hrusinsky attempts suicide by gassing himself in his bathtub. The "Murder" of the title is not a murder as such, rather the murder that Hrusinsky remembers planning upon discovering his wife's unfaithfulness with his supposed friend and advisor. Both plots failing in his mind, he loses himself in fantastic reveries of his funeral and of hypocritical mourners. ' Deciding (perhaps) that this is not the way out either, he gives up the attempt and imagines a life of reconciliation and eventual affluence.

Shortish forty-year old Ludvík Podzimek, lute and flute player in a Prague orchestra, is far from being an attractive man. He is nevertheless generally considered a great 'Don Juan'. Women take up with him out of a certain motherly compassion and Ludvík's tender heart does not allow him to split with any of them. His lovers thus accumulate and cause him numerous troubles.

A worker steals bits and pieces of building materials from work to construct a new home for himself and his girlfriend. When he discovers that she’s having an affair with his boss, he devises one elaborate plot after another to murder the rival, each time with pathetic results.