Antonín Novotný

Three Wishes

Chlap jako hora

Čertova nevěsta

Hlavní výhra

A young, unmarried woman finds herself a "little bit pregnant" and she tries to hide this fact from her mother but it isn't long before the truth is obvious.

A small town is one day visited by a priest who is there on a secret mission. He is a member of the Inquisition sent to investigate the activities of a local miller. The miller and his son are the descendants of an old family whose ancestral home burned down a century ago, but was rebuilt from scratch. The miller inherited much of his knowledge about the land, water, and a building's stability from generations of family experience. His reputation for finding water and predicting when a structure might collapse have come to the attention of the Inquisition -surely he must be in league with the Devil.

Valčík pro milión

Einstein kontra Babinský

On the Tightrope

Fati Farari, a black man from Africa, is completing his studies in classical piano at the Music Academy of Prague. It's the day before his first solo concert, where he is going to play Bach. While he strolls around the city he is thinking, not so much about the concert as about himself, both as a lonely foreigner and as a human being in cosmos. Here and there he encounters some racist comments, but mostly he just feels the weight of social exclusion because of his otherness, especially when it comes to women. On the morning of the day for his concert the embassy informs him that his whole family has perished. He feels totally broken, although he thinks that everyone holds some pain inside. His piano teacher, a professor at the Academy, looks him up, and tells him that he heard what has happened. The professor advises him to communicate his feelings that evening by using his Bach.

A dark fable set in an early 1950s Czech village, a time of Soviet-style socialism which saw the implementation of collectivized agriculture and the mass closure of monasteries and convents.