Jaroslav Kučera

After losing his parents, a young Jewish boy wanders Eastern Europe, seeking refuge during World War II.

The story is freely inspired by the life and work of Jan Saudek, who is probably the most well-known Czech photographer internationally and has indisputably been involved in the development of international photography. He has exhibited and sold his work in the largest galleries and art houses, he has earned international recognition and awards, he enjoys great popularity and interest - he is a true phenomenon.

Jolana (18) is an object of her step-father's desire. She is unable to cope, especially when her own mother turns a blind eye. Those events are heavily paid for when she finds herself working in a brothel. Her inability to cope raise a question: What is it she actually wants? Are her dreams of escaping really better than the reality she finds herself in?

Film crew on the road: Director (Jaroslav Plesl), his Producer (Simona Babcáková), and their Director of Photography (Jirí Vyorálek) and Sound Arist (Johana Svarcova). Starving artists who already have a number of films to their names, Czech Lion award-winning films, excellent reviews and have been screened at numerous festivals, but they don't have audiences. Their next collaborative effort - the Director's lifetime dream - is quickly becoming oblivion because he failed to win a grant, which means it won't be made. And so the frustrated Director and his colleagues await their chance among record-holders of curious disciplines such as crawling with a squash racket or collecting four-leaf clovers. How will the collision of these two worlds end? What will the Director's next film be about?

This story actually happened in the region around the city of Sumperk in Jeseniky Mountains in May 1945. The disappearance of Agnes, the German wife of a Czech forester Jan Olsan is a dark mystery. She is the only one who knows who and for what reason is looking for her. It's the end of the war, times are bad and the Czechs are coming back from the inland to the frontier. The guards are forming and soldiers are coming. Fate brings together the outlaw Jan and his German brother-in-law Jurgen who has just returned from the eastern front line. Both men are looking for exactly the same woman and that is Agnes. But Agnes escaped; she is running away through the deep woods followed by the most powerful man of the county. Running away for what she had witnessed. The fatality of the relationship between Agnes and Jan can only be learned in the mountains on this thorny journey.

Julie is a woman who seemingly has everything. A handsome husband, teenage daughter and a thriving, undemanding job as a translator and now even a new dream house ... But she also has a secret that is slowly changing her idyllic life...

Slovakia, on the eve of the outbreak of World War II. The family of the young Jewish Martin Friedmann gathers to celebrate his bar mitzvah and make a solemn promise that they will all meet again a year later around the same table; but the storms of war and anti-Semitic fanaticism will lead each of them down very different paths.

A grittily realistic tale of prostitution at an Eastern European border town

A WW I veteran still haunted by his time in the trenches settles in a small town to work for the railroad company. His pretty wife attracts the attention of the lonely young gravedigger.

The Grand Hotel is a place between heaven and earth. A place where clouds and human desires float by. This metaphorical story is set in a famous hotel towering above Liberec. Working there, as both guardian and prisoner, is Fleischman, a maintenance man and amateur meteorologist who wanted to be as close to heaven as life would allow him. And you can't get any higher than that.

Lt. Franta Slama is a top pilot in the Czech Air Force who is assigned to train a promising young flier, Karel Vojtisek, and they soon become friends. When Nazi Germany invades Czechoslovakia in 1939, they both reject the authority of their new leaders and escape to England where they join other Czech exiles in the RAF. While flying a mission over England, Karel crash lands and happens upon the farmhouse of Susan, a young woman whose husband is in the Navy. Karel soon falls head over heels for Susan but, while they enjoy a brief fling, in time Susan decides she prefers the company of the older and more worldly Franta. As Franta and Karel struggle to maintain their friendship despite their romantic rivalry.

Liesel Landauer and her friend Hana are linked by a lifelong relationship and an exceptional house built by the architect Von Abt for Liesel and her husband Viktor in Czechoslovakia in the early 1930s.

Dostoevsky’s latter-day opus about the siblings and their father is among the masterpieces of world literature. It asks profound questions about ethics and religion. Is there a God? Does the devil exist? Is everything allowed because we live in a world without morality? And if so, does patricide even constitute a crime? One of the most interesting adaptations of the material is The Karamazovs by Czech director Petr Zelenka. We witness a group of thesps from Prague on a trip to Krakow in Poland to stage the novel as a play in a derelict steelworks as part of the Closer to Life Festival. The project, however, is born under the bad sign, apparently doomed from the start. When they arrive, the roof is about to cave in, so that the actors are told to wear safety helmets. Their sole consistent audience is a laborer (Andrzej Mastalerz) who rather follows each dress rehearsal than watching over his seven-year-old son who has suffered a tragic accident in the factory.

Situated in Prague, a 20-year-old Vietnamese named Song, hoped for a better future in Europe. But now in a Vietnamese district in Prague, he is trapped in a marijuana grow house and has life of a modern slave. Police rounds up the place. Song runs away on the rooftop of a condo building in a nearby district where he breaks down. Mr. Rypar (78) lives alone. He is fond of the old times, living in a strong opposition to modern world. Rypar goes up on the roof and meets Song standing on the very edge of the roof crying and the story begins.

As World War II rages on, Villi and Colette are captured and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. Imprisoned within separate compounds, the lovers must risk their lives to be together again.

Môj pes Killer is a one-day drama portraying eighteen-year-old Marek living near the Slovak-Moravian border with his dad and his racist friends. However, Marek's best true friend is his dog. His life is shaken up when he discovers the secret of his lost mother Marika.

Fogi is enjoying his never ending puberty. But simultaneously Fogi is also trying to live up to his family duties and bring up Véna, his son from the first marriage. He did not get married again but lives with Jana, a post office employee. Together they have little Anicka and they all live in a flat in a small town. At first, Jana is trying to tolerate Fogi's moods, but her patience is running out. Fogi loses his job. On top of that he starts to see himself in his adolescent son and realizes with horror that Véna repeats his own mistakes. The first fights, bans and mutual misunderstandings are approaching.

Communism seen through the eyes of a young girl who watches her beloved uncle struggle with the oppressive government .

Passionate Emma and impulsive but introverted Tomáš fall in love. They are like two missing puzzle pieces coming together. But Emma's pornographic past inevitably catches up with them.

Mária, a retired teacher, one fine day decides she no longer wants to feel like a cow, and when not even the mayor helps her against the arrogant source of local evil, she obtains a gun and resolves to do what most of us occasionally think of but immediately banish from our minds. Very soon, however, she discovers that just as murder is morally complex, it is equally complex logistically, despite her former pupil, now on probation, offering her this priceless life advice: “Crime only looks simple, Mrs. Teacher, but then something always goes to shit.”

Adolescence is always a difficult time; it is doubly so for Gábina. For one thing, she is growing up in the normalization years of the 1970s, and then she also has to face the reality that her father is a well-known actor disavowed by the regime. Although he abandoned the family years before, his existence casts an ominous shadow over the lives of not only Gábina, but also her older sister and mother, who are trying to find a civilized way through the social mire of the times.

Libor, a former teacher, enjoys a well-paid position as a bank manager, living in a luxurious villa outside Prague. His business partners are taken into custody and the authorities have a few questions for him to answer. Rather than wait around, he decides to take off to Moravia with his wife and two children. In the process, he pretends that everything is normal, rediscovers the value of family life, meets up with a former colleague lost in provincial obscurity, and becomes the object of a manhunt. Libor is not a criminal type, merely someone who signs cheques and is drawn into a business world failing to recognise its own criminality (he doesn’t even flee the country).

Over the course of a year, in a small town scarred and beaten down by industrialization, Tonda and Monika, friends since childhood, come to experience what life might be like if they could be with one another – which they seemingly can't. Or can they?