Zánik Československa v parlamentu

This FitzPatrick Traveltalk series short looks at Czechoslovakia before World War II, including images of bridges, churches, and castles in Prague, also a non-military parade through the city.

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

A film about the phenomenon of Alexander Dubček, a Czechoslovak politician, one of the most prominent personalities of the Prague Spring of 1968, author of the concept of “socialism with a human face”.

Moje století

The Flying Fercos delves into the lives of a family who shared their home-and their stage-with over 20 lions, tigers, and panthers.

The desire for freedom during the period of “normalisation” in Czechoslovakia led to the creation of a group of individuals who professed a deep inclination towards the principles of the underground movement. After many years they are unable to face their mutual suspicions of betrayal in the form of cooperation with the state-security police. The memory of their tragically departed guru, philosopher and poet, Marcel Strýko, drifts throughout their story. In an effort to come to terms with the past, an old companion from Prague organises a revival concert in a Gothic cathedral. Will these freethinking members manage to achieve a truce?

Reinhard Heydrich was considered the most dangerous man in Nazi Germany after Hitler himself. The plot to kill him masterminded in England and carried through to finality in Prague in 1942, is told in this gripping dramatised documentary special. Featuring meticulous reconstructions, coupled with authentic historical film, some of it never shown before the film powerfully presents a vivid account of the only successful assassination of a leading Nazi in World War II. It also chillingly recreates the terrible human cost of SS savagery against the Resistance and the total obliteration of the village of Lidice.

Cesta ke svobodě

Tenkrát

Věčná Slavia

After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Libuše Jarcovjáková, a young female photographer, strives to break free from the constraints of Czechoslovak normalization and embarks on a wild journey towards freedom, capturing her experiences on thousands of subjective photographs.

Oľga Ondreičková is one of the exceptional figures of the first generation of Slovak architects. Her work is characterized by pragmatism, simplicity, and monumentality. Her husband is architect Pavel Ondreička, with whom she collaborated on several projects, as well as on the design of furniture, interiors, and artistic decorations. At the height of her career, Oľga Ondreičková led her own project team, which was rare for a woman at that time.

An epic exploration of the Czechoslovak New Wave cinema of the 1960s and 70s, structured around a series of conversations with one of its most acclaimed exponents - Closely Observed Trains director Jiří Menzel.

Documentary showing the Czechoslovakian political landscape in March 1968, when president Antonin Novotny, a hardline Stalinist, stepped down and moderate communist Ludvik Svoboda was elected. Five months later, in August 68, the Prague Spring would end with the military intervention of the Warsaw Pact.

In its "velvet revolution" of 1989, the people of Czechoslovakia toppled its communist dictatorship and embraced democracy and capitalism. By January 1993, the country had peacefully split in two. In the early 1990s, thousands of American college graduates began flocking to Prague, where they could postpone entering the "real world," and live cheaply in a beautiful undiscovered European city. Throughout that decade more and more tourists crossed the statue-lined Charles Bridge in search of old world beauty previously hidden by communist isolation. But what of the people who cross the Charles Bridge on their way to work every morning? Who are the Czechs? What is their history? What is their future? My Prague Spring is an award-winning film that vividly humanizes a resilient people who have survived a tumultuous history. In the spring of 1990, a Czech-American filmmaker spent four months living with his Czech relatives, and opened an intimate window into an uncertain world.

The film is a Slovak version of The Thin Blue Line, recounting the unsolved disappearance and murder of a young woman that happened thirty years ago. It was a case that was paraded in the communist media at the end of which seven individuals were found guilty of this heinous crime. They are the same individuals who at present proclaim their innocence.

The Way of the Psychonaut explores the life and work of Stanislav Grof, Czech-born psychiatrist and psychedelic psychotherapy pioneer. Stan’s quest for knowledge and insights into the healing power of non-ordinary states of consciousness, influenced the discipline of psychology and profoundly changed many individual lives. One of those transformed by Stan is filmmaker Susan Hess Logeais. The documentary utilizes Susan’s personal existential crisis as a gateway to Grof’s impact, from the micro to the macro.

This architecturally unique resort on the shores of Lake Orlík was a secret retreat for the communist establishment in the 1960s, but later, rampant capitalism handed it over to now infamous businessmen. Imbued with a mysterious atmosphere, this portrait captures the genius loci and turbulent history of a hidden summer paradise that was never marked on any map.

Jaromír Jágr

How, in 1945, after the end of World War II and the fall of the Nazi regime, the defeated were atrociously mistreated, especially those ethnic Germans who had lived peacefully for centuries in Germany's neighboring countries, such as Czechoslovakia and Poland. A heartbreaking story of revenge against innocent civilians, the story of acts as cruel as the Nazi occupation during the war years.