Blanka Kulová

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 look at the life, work and importance of Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman (1910-89), a genius of world cinema, a wizard of special effects, revealing his sources of inspiration and his revolutionary filming techniques.

The heroes of the film came together in a theater troupe—Passengers—and together they prepared a play about how they imagine their lives after leaving the children's home where they grew up. However, reality is much more dramatic than theater.

Imprisoned for the brutal murder of her unfaithful boyfriend and his lover, Cassandra has engineered her escape and is now on the run having taken on a nurses identity. Arriving at a desolate country estate, Ravencrest, it at first appears to be a stud farm. However, Cassandra soon relaises that the stud farm is a front for an international kidnapping cartel whose illicit business is the smuggling of beautiful young women into the United States, where they are trained and turned into sex slaves!

Theatre personality, musician, poet, writer, graphic artist, collector, self-professed clown, eternally young in spirit – all this is Jiří Suchý, one of the key figures of the domestic cultural scene over the last six decades. He has put on 97 plays at the Semafor theatre and has written the lyrics for 1,400 songs and the music for 500. Today, in an era beset by an onslaught of images that are often of questionable worth, this legendary figure’s tireless efforts to enrich the Czech language and its poetic nuances have been of inestimable value. Olga Sommerová lays before us Suchý’s prolific creative and civic journey through life with the subtle distinctiveness we have come to expect; she also demonstrates her singular flair for capturing exceptional moments.