Miroslav Macháček

Pavel is a Czech partisan fighter in the waning days of the war. Just as peace is declared, Pavel is shot in the spine and sent to the hospital emergency ward. As he fades in and out of consciousness, he recalls the events that led to his participation in the underground. Holding German occupation commander Engelchen responsible for all the horrors and deprivations heaped upon his comrades, Pavel is kept alive by the possibility of recovering and exacting vengeance upon the Nazi officer - no matter how long it takes.

The year is 2163. Starship Ikaria XB-1 embarks on a mission deep into space in search of alien life. During their perilous journey the crew confront the effects of a malignant dark star, the destructive legacy of the 20th century and, ultimately, the limits of their own sanity.

Based on the only extensive prose work by the surrealist painter Josef Capek, Shades of Fern most resembles the philosophical fairy tales and fables of Josef’s older brother, the legendary Czech novelist and playwright Karel Capek. Two young poachers, more boys than men, kill a gamekeeper when they are caught illegally hunting. Panicked, they retreat into a forest that grows steadily more forbidding and deadly as their fear for the future—and guilt over their action—mounts. Loosely based on hundreds of oral folk tales and legends that haunt the woods of Czechoslovakia, Vlácil’s contemporary updating artistically underscores the relationship between man and nature, crime and punishment, isolation and society, and guilt and memory.

Michal's father and his friends are stigmatized by their war experience and the post-war social deformations in which they took part either directly, or watched them cowardly and in silence. They are trying to repress their feelings of guilt and justify their behavior to the young generation with memories of their heroic war feats. Michal, however, does not want to have anything to do with their problems. He subconsciously perceives the unpleasant atmosphere in the family as well as his father's hypocrisy. After one of many quarrels with his father, he runs away from home, determined to go his own way.

The distressing fate of the Czech great Jan Amos Komenský, forced to leave his homeland after the White Mountain disaster. It depicts his encounters with various European personalities of the 17th century - the Queen of Sweden, artists and scientists. It emphasises the hero's nobility, but also his inner resilience, which allowed him to overcome many personal and professional tragedies. The parable of The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart becomes part of the story. However, Comenius's concept is sculpturally lifeless and, in particular, the religious dimension is "erased" from it. The simplistic biography therefore does not avoid schoolboyish dryness.

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.

Cast out by his father, young Ondrej joins the Order of the Teutonic Knights, where he is raised by strict monk Armin. After years of hardship, Ondrej escapes from the Order when he is wrongly punished, and sets out for his former home. Arriving to discover his father to be dead, Ondrej now not only assumes control of his father's properties, but seeks to marry his former stepmother.

Eleven disparate adolescents, gathered for a skiing camp at an isolated winter resort, find themselves preyed upon and set against one another by their three mysterious instructors.

Lemuel Gulliver has had a car accident and continues his journey across the unknown countryside on foot. On the road he finds a dead rabbit dressed like a man and takes a watch from its waistcoat breast pocket. The half-ruined house that he enters reminds Lemuel of his childhood and brings up a painful memory of a dearly loved girl Markéta who was drowned years ago. Gulliver finds himself in Balnibarbi, a country where he doesn't understand the laws and habits and so continually offends against public decency. It is a day when people are ordered to keep their mouths shut and they force their visitor to follow suit. He faces harsh interrogation and finds it difficult to explain that he is not the rabbit Oscar whose watch has been found in his possession.

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.

Eva and her younger brother Johnny own two sentient octopuses made out of strange matter. Will their parents divorce and ruin Christmas? Will a scientist find a way to use their pets as fuel? Live action film with stop-motion octopuses.

It is almost twenty years after the war. Wounds of the past that have never fully healed, but are still carried by many in their hearts. Marie Vláčilová, a survivor of one of the prison camps in Germany, also carries the traumas of the time with her. Now, so many years later, a mass grave of prisoners from that camp has been found and investigators visit Marie to get any information they can from her about the camp. With her important information, she is then to become a crown witness for the prosecution in Germany and now prepares to travel. But this brings back more and more unpleasant memories - especially of her daughter Paula, who has been through German re-education and hardly knew her mother after the reunion...

The film is essentially a feature-length commercial for an exhibition to mark the 40th anniversary of the nationalisation of the Czechoslovak film industry, to be held at the Prague U Hybernu venue. The protagonists of the piece are comedians Oldrich Kaiser and Jirí Lábus, who are set to accept an award from Japanese television representatives at the exhibition. At the same time, five gangsters plot to seize a revolutionary invention devised by professor Suzuki - a super holograph, which enables any figure from television to be transported in the flesh into the real world, and vice-versa.

Sherlock Holmes likes to play violin and expects a great career in music. He gets a place in a spa orchestra, but he is again and again distracted by criminal cases. Therefore he is the only one who does not see that his violin has no future. He solves the criminal mysteries in passing but the final test shows that the famous detective is tone-deaf.

While on vacation with their bickering parents, young Eva and her little brother Johnny find in a polluted lake two strange friendly sentient octopuses made of strange material that attracts electricity. They take them as pets.

Even if a person grumbles about difficulties, he should realize that he will find a place where he did not want to go at all. Such an exemplary realization is also reached by a budding doctor who was assigned a remote border village as his first posting - his fiancé did not want to go to such a backwater at all. But the example of the local doctor, who is about to retire, convinces him that a good doctor is needed everywhere.

The parents decided to send two twins, Honza, and Martin, on vacation to their grandfather.

Several foreign agents are interested in a famous Austrian scientist, the discoverer of an artificial protein. The endangered man never notices the trouble around him. His protection was entrusted to the mysterious Madame Elizabeth, amongst agents famed as the ' 006, in fact, working for State Security...

A crime story about Western diplomats in Prague.

In Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, a doctor-turned-warehouse employee reluctantly agrees to treat a gravely wounded political fugitive, putting himself and everyone living in his building complex in danger.

Managers at the construction of a big hydro plant are accused of having embezzled money.

Pepe and Prengel, returning from war, meet Ester and both fall in love with the girl and live together in a deserted house. Fanatic communist, Zelmira, wants to turn their world upside-down.

An aging professor at a Prague neurological clinic is forced to confront his personal values and the harsh boundaries of medical science. Already burdened by the ultimate questions of life and death, his ethical convictions are put to the test by Víťa, a young patient with an inoperable tumor.

A story of a man threatened by a fatal illness evaluating his life (the number 322 in the film title stands for the diagnosis of one kind of cancer). He understands his illness as a form of punishment for his cruel deeds in the 1950s. In the face of reality and his efforts to cleanse himself he hits a barrier of indifference, lack of interest, and individual and collective selfishness. He has to find his own reconciliation with his illness and his past and present life.

While on vacation with their bickering parents in Portugal, Eva and her little brother Johnny find two strange clots of clay on a polluted beach, who can speak and move on their own. They create two octopuses out of the blue and green material and take them home to Prague, soon discovering that their new pets attract electricity and other disasters.

Sňatky z rozumu was a Czechoslovak television programme which was first broadcast in 1968. The programme was directed by František Filip.