Tomáš Doruška

Near us, nature takes back what man has stolen. Within the environment of open cast brown coalmines and spoil tips which are the reminder of a lunar landscape, one finds paradoxically a true tale of an impregnable wild countryside.

Protesters diary from Gezi Park - Taksim Square, Istanbul. Occupy Gezi movement started when the government decided to build shopping mall in place of the last green area that remained in the middle of Taksim Square.

The Zharkov family-father, mother and two young sons-belong to the Dolgan community, one of the last indigenous peoples pursuing their traditional nomadic life in the extreme north of Siberia. The children used to be sent to boarding school, where they became estranged from their family and culture, but nowadays they can get homeschooling from teachers assigned to them by the Russian authorities. Seven-year-old Zakhar and his older brother Prokopy are the protagonists in this calm, observational film. Zakhar's first year of schooling is with Nelly, a young but serious teacher. She tells him about President Putin and the importance of mathematics, and he learns classical poems by heart.

Amidst today’s urban jungle of concrete, glass and metal, it is easy to forget that we actually live in the territory formerly dominated by wildlife. Many of its members have been exterminated by humans, while others have fled the sprawling urbanization to the surrounding countryside. It is their survival strategies that get revealed in exciting detail in the documentary series, Planet Czechia. For two years, a team of camera operators headed by Jan Hošek were recording a life cycle of Prague’s wild animal world across all seasons of the year. The film, accompanied by the commentary read by the actor Jiří Macháček, registers everyday struggles of the fat dormouse, the mouflon, blackbirds or the water hen, teaching the viewers in a casual manner a higher degree of tolerance toward the city’s overlooked inhabitants.

Three stories ; The Garden of Eden, The Open Country of a Lonely Man, Riedgost ; introduce the youngest generation of Czech filmmakers. They are linked through the similarity of their story-telling poetic and their interest in uncommon environments and heroes. The filmmakers' results confirm the saying that what we long for most is often sitting right in front of our eyes.

The film is about the long-term relationship between the director and the character of her first film, the French indie artist, musician and director Siegfried, known as Sig. The story is dedicated to the experience of growing up, emancipation and finding their own identity in life and in art. The film raises questions about the nature of the student-teacher relationship, which inevitably involves submission and conflict, and the nature of the director and hero relationship, which is based on love and a little manipulation.

In the 1980s, dozens of Namibian children were brought up in socialist Czechoslovakia. The aim of this special education program was to raise a new generation of children as a politically conscious elite. But the experiment ended in the early 1990s following fundamental political changes in both countries. The children were forcibly repatriated back to Namibia where they were unable to adapt culturally due to never having completed their elementary education nor receiving any formal language and psychological training. Documentary filmmakers tracked down the now-adult Namibian children and followed their fates both in Namibia and in the Czech Republic over the course of three years.

With humor our adventure story deals with the timeless theme of the conflict between unlimited power on the one hand, and the desire for freedom, courage and love on the other. A troupe of buskers lands on an island governed by a despotic ruler with strict police control. When, during their performance, a shot fired from a circus cannon goes astray, it triggers a series of unexpected events. A young man and woman, Drin and Tuvi, and Nathan the seagull have to enter into an uneven struggle with totalitarian power. A struggle which eventually changes the fates of all the island inhabitants - both human and feathered.