Jiří Krejčík

Two families, Sebkovi and Krausovi, are celebrating Christmas, but not everyone is in a good mood. The teenage kids think that their fathers are totally stupid, and the fathers are sure that their children are nothing more than rebels, hating anything they say.

This movie is based on texts of Bohumil Hrabal, world-known Czech prosaic. It's a story (in a form of a mosaic of short episodes and pictures) about the sadness and happiness of inhabitants of Kersko (Kersko is a small woody area full of cottages and roods). These people are both simple and sensitive, they have their own pleasures (e.g. Leli is a collector of cheap, but inutile things) and the greatest delight of all of them is a hunting. Crude poetics of amateur hunting is screened by dreamy pictures of this area. Menzel mixes sentimental lyricism and rough (but not vulgar!) humor and the outcome is the never-ending landscape of continuous life in the proximate nearness of nature. The performances of actors are brilliant. Both Rudolf Hrusinsky as a Franz and Jaromír Hanzlik as a Leli have nonrecurring charm bottomed on a pain and inebriation. Only the music is not perfect: Jiri Sust usually assembled his film music from his older works and in this movie there is many quotations.

Labyrint

Barrandovské nokturno aneb Jak film tančil a zpíval

Hoteliér

Prodavač humoru

A labyrinthine portrait of Czech culture on the brink of a new millennium. Egon Bondy prophesies a capitalist inferno, Jim Čert admits to collaborating with the secret police, Jaroslav Foglar can’t find a bottle-opener, and Ivan Diviš makes observations about his own funeral. This is the Czech Republic in the late 90s, as detailed in Karel Vachek’s documentary.

Ester Krumbachová - a costume designer, screenwriter, director; one of the boldest personalities of the Czech New Wave. She worked in theatre, she was a writer and an illustrator. She co-created films such as O slavnosti a hostech (1966), Sedmikrásky (1966), Vsichni dobrí rodáci (1969), Pension pro svobodné pány (1968), Valerie a týden divu (1970), Slamený klobouk (1972) and many others. In the 1960s, she was a 'pivot' of the art scene in Prague, attracting artists who were on the threshold of their career, just setting out to find their own form of self-realization. Those who underwent her tutelage remember her forever. Director Vera Chytilová talks to those who knew Ester Krumbachová, who worked with her, befriended her, loved her. She sets off on a search that is to end by answering the question: Who was Ester?

"Situation of the Street" - An experimental study about Czech life, focusing on Prague's National Street, its businesses and the varied people who frequent it.

Pamětnice

Quite a few years have passed since November 1989. Czechoslovakia has been divided up and, in the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus’s right-wing government is in power. Karel Vachek follows on from his film New Hyperion, thus continuing his series of comprehensive film documentaries in which he maps out Czech society and its real and imagined elites in his own unique way.

Television series Golden Sixties examines new insights into Czech and Slovak cinema of the 1960s and the role of the Czechoslovak New Wave. Each episode focuses on a different filmmaker.