Tag: CZECHOSLOVAKIA

April 3, 2025 / Short

This film is a playful depiction of the festivities around the performance If All Trains of the World by Alex Mlynárčik on June 12, 1971. Still photography, live action, interviews, old etchings and archive footage of old train journeys are skilfully blended to create a sympathetic and humorous portrait of the romance of an old steam train and the joy of artists and the general public in participating in this children’s game for adults. Once again, the avant-garde is imaginatively used to eulogise over traditional values and the past. Deň radosti is important not just for the considerable pleasure it brings; it is the first of a series of films in which artists use film to document happenings.

March 27, 2024 / Documentary

A leading director of the Czech film renaissance provides a philosophical meditation on life and death, set amidst complex hospital apparatus and the sadness, hope, or resignation of the patients. Existentialist rather than optimist, the approach is one of humanistic atheism, accepting death as part of life. Interviews with doctors and nurses explore their outlook; all speak of death as a fact, without either sentimentality or religiosity. The studied objectivity of the film only imperfectly hides an intense emotionality.

September 11, 2023 / Family
August 6, 2022 / Drama
January 28, 2022 / Animation

A view of man’s perpetual struggle for self-destruction, in which we glimpse a world where rockets are part of everyone’s lives. In the end the red button is accidentally pressed by a careless caretaker, expressing the fear in all our minds.

September 25, 2021 / Drama
September 10, 2021 / Arthouse

Sonya is the inheritor to the riches of a Czech noble family – the Hajns. Petr, a social climber marries her, ignoring the shady goings-on, especially an insane uncle who prowls the mansion thinking he is invisible, a peccadilo the family seems to bear with and entertain. The mad uncle stalking every corner of the house, popping out of cupboards and curtains slowly takes its toll on the young bride.

September 1, 2021 / Arthouse

The story of a man who finds himself in a hospital with a suspicion of a serious illness. He is rethinking his life so far, and his encounters with close and foreign people also create the image of the society of the 1960s, full of hope and disillusionment. The author raises here the basic problems of human existence, questions of freedom, loneliness, non-communicativeness, the search for the heroes’ own identity and their place in society.