Jakub Halousek

The film follows the fate of the real inhabitants of the former German village of Vitín. The central character of the film is Otto Hille, who comes from a Czech-German family. He prepares an expedition for the old and seriously ill Leopold Švarc, which is supposed to be a cathartic journey into the past shrouded in mystery. Schwartz is accompanied by the faithfully serving autistic Michel, the cook Jan and Dr. Ignaci. Otto also enlists the begging bankrupt painter Henry to join the group. The expedition takes Otto to the land of his ancestors - the long-decayed German village of Vitín. He witnesses the events of 1945, where he meets his grandfather Otfried Hille. The trauma of the past becomes the key to understanding the present.

Adam Oĺha's father, a well-known Slovak educator and filmmaker, decided to leave his wife and six children and start anew after years of living together. Adam takes his place and starts recording the family's peripeteia. As the eldest of the siblings and the last man in the family, he examines his father's old picture records, compares them with the present and tries to find out what led to this radical change.

When the Okamura brothers left Japan with their mother as children, their grandmother looked after the eldest, Hayato, whilst their mother was ill, whilst Osamu and Tomio spent just under a year in a children’s home. Yet this continuing story of one family gave rise to very different destinies. Their political careers have placed Hayato and Tomio on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. Hayato has dedicated his life to Christian values and the pursuit of consensus, whilst Tomio ‘protects’ the Czech people from a wave of immigrants. The youngest brother, Osamu, who works as an architect, can be found, for example, at a demonstration for the rights of the Roma. The intertwining of the three brothers’ current, often conflicting visions serves as concrete evidence of how personal and social experiences shape the political landscape.

A poetic, but chilling story of seven puppets in train car prior to its journey to a concentration camp.

Hundreds of teenagers join the Slovak Recruits paramilitary group to get ready for the final clash of civilizations and to fight whoever invades their country.

Vitaly is a nuclear physicist and record-holder in extreme cold-exposure training who now makes a living as a bricklayer, surviving below the poverty line in Novosibirsk. Like the rest of his family, former scientists and members of the old Soviet Elite, he dreams of a return to the great Soviet Union, a fairy-tale country that would eliminate all the injustice from their lives, as the reason for their misfortune lies with the capitalists of the West. For years, Vitaly has expressed his radical opinions on his eccentric video blog.

Even amongst Christmas decorations a spark of fancy may appear. What to do though when merciless Fate (or the human hand) has placed our beloved right to the other side of the tree? No use crying when a decoration wants to achieve something - it must unhook itself. And thus, our snowman Karel sets off with the straw angel Kamil in search of snow-lass Eva. They wander through the Christmas tree overcoming obstacles, and with the help of other distinctive decorations they eventually reach Eva who is being held captive by the evil Balls brothers.

An original portrayal of a small Czech village where – as the locals put it – an UFO has landed in the form of a kilometre-long silverish factory: a Korean Hyundai automobile plant. The village, hitherto famous mostly for its sauerkraut and the “Radegast” beer was thus turned into an industrial zone – the largest greenfield investment project in the Czech Republic’s history. Nonetheless, for a long time many farmers resisted selling the land upon which the factory was now standing. Eventually, they all succumbed under the pressure from the neighbours, and even the anonymous death threats. The filmmakers returned to Nošovice two years after the dramatic property buyouts, at the time when the factory has just started churning out cheap cars. Combining the perspectives of seven characters, they have composed a portrayal of a place suddenly changed beyond recognition that is playful and chilling at the same time: a politically engaged absurd flick about a field that yields cars.

Behind the curtain of the film strip the concreteness of images appears and disappears again with varying levels of visuals shifts and deformations. The sounds of the film’s movement mix with voices that give the scenes context but nevertheless prevent a reconstruction of the fable. – The story dissolves, and during this layering we move further away from it ever being one.

Today, analogue video is attractive primarily thanks to the distinctive aesthetic quality of its pixelated image and raster errors. But for Czech artists who first explored the possibilities offered by video art in the late 1980s, this medium represented a path towards freedom. Through a portrait of her grandfather Radek Pilař, one of the pioneers of Czech video art, the director explores her own legacy of imperative creative fascination. Her film’s main story, i.e., the process of reconstructing the 1989 exhibition Video Day, contrasts this enchantment with life in the final days of the totalitarian regime, which different sharply with the adventures of those who decided to emigrate – whom the filmmaker also visits in order to discover forgotten works, get to know their creators, and re-establish broken ties.

Lucie Sunková’s short film The Tree is a metaphorical story about the parallels in lives of people and trees, a lyrical poem about birth and death, about the flow of our time and the nature surrounding us, a parable about parenthood and crossing the boundaries of a human (not only) life. It is a story about relations, seeming hopelessness and a happy promise. Used paint-on-glass technique, a pure poetic means of expression ideal for a story like this, forms another metaphoric layer of the film withs its laboriousness and graphic style. The budget of this co-production reached almost 150 thousand EUR and was almost evenly divided between MAUR film and French production company Les Films de l’Arlequin. Both sides were supported by their respective national funds – State Cinematography Fund in the Czech Republic and the prestigious national fund CNC – Centre National du Cinema in France.

The film is an inquiry into contemporary forms of alternative models of partnerships. For many protagonists, polyamory, open marriage or long-term lover-to-lover relationships present a fulfilling life style, but also a struggle with misunderstanding of the society or conflicts within their own relationships. The director follows the development of relations of her protagonists over several years, while in intimate talks, she searches for the joy, striving and insecurities brought along by such unusual faces of love, revealing a need for redefining partnership in our times.

Trapped in an abusive marriage, a wealthy German prince desperately seeks a way out. But what appears to be the road to salvation soon turns into a highway to hell. The universal language of music meets the international language of Esperanto in this debut opera by Ivan Acher. The carpenter, forest worker, designer and composer has cleverly blended electro-acoustic and contemporary music to breathe life into Ladislav Klíma’s expressionist novel, The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch.

Jan Hus - A Mass for Three Dead Men tries to recover the legacy of the medieval reformist priest Jan Hus who was burnt to death by inquisition for his criticism and calling for reformation of the Catholic Church in 1415. The story takes place in the late 20th Century and relates to history of territory recently known as the Eastern Block. Jan Hus introduces three individuals - Ryszard Siwiec, Oskar Brüsewitz, and Graham Bamford, who set themselves on fire to protest against the political regimes in which they lived, and against which they had struggled.

Like the steam that silently appears and then disappears over a flowing river, the life of every human is just as fleeting, and this particularly applies in the case of artists. The transience of their fame is the main topic of this documentary, which provides a glimpse into the lives of three ageing jazzmen: trumpeter Laco Deczi, saxophonist Ľubomír Tamaškovič, and contrabass player Ján Jankeje, who fled from the Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia to the West, where their stars shone alongside those of the world’s famous musicians.

This documentary study of the mechanisms that turn the gears of the tabloids is conducted by the unique figure Pavel Novotný. This editor-in-chief of one of the most widely read Czech media outlets of the time, providing news from the world of show business and human misfortune, gets straight to the point. Readership is a fetish, an absolute alibi for all invasions of privacy and every transgression of good ethics. Seen up close, the whole cluster of disreputable reports looks like a staged tableau. Before the eager eyes of an anxious public, celebrities willingly or unwillingly perform acts that the scrutiny of the all-powerful tabloid workers attributes racy significance to.

At first glance, time seems to have stood still in the west Kyrgyz village of Barskon. Veterans of the Second World War enjoy the greatest respect and many of the people here look back with nostalgia at the socialist era, when everyone had work, healthcare was free and "we all had it just as good". The gulags seem to be the only thing the locals have somehow forgotten about… One of the protagonists in the film is the slightly mysterious truck driver Nurbek, who has been working with his wife for 10 years in the local gold mine known as Kumtor. This is the place where the director Tomáš Kudrna faithfully documents the peculiar form of capitalism and democracy that prevails in a country that looks like an open-air Soviet museum. We see the petty disputes between the locals and also look at the events of 1998, when two tonnes of cyanide leaked into the river from the Kumtor mine and poisoned hundreds of villagers.