Filip Remunda

Over the course of one year, this film follows the life of an ordinary Pyongyang family whose daughter was chosen to take part in Day of the Shining Star (Kim Jong-il's birthday) celebration. While North Korean government wanted a propaganda film, the director kept on filming between the scripted scenes. The ritualized explosions of color and joy contrast sharply with pale everyday reality, which is not particularly terrible, but rather quite surreal.

Russian Federation, December 31, 1999. After President Boris Yeltsin's unexpected resignation, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin becomes acting president of the country. From that day and for a year, Vitaly Mansky's camera documented Putin's rise to power. The story of a privileged witness. The harsh explanation of the reason why politics is the art of possibility of achieving the best with the support of many, but also of giving the worst in return.

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.

The Covid-19 pandemic hit Czech society hard between 2020 and 2022. Pervasive restrictions trapped us at home for weeks and months, people died by the thousands, and the overburdened healthcare system ran at full speed. The course of the world seemed, in the words of Karel Vachek, to stop for a moment, and we held our breath for what would happen next. A documentary depiction of the greatest global catastrophe in ages is dedicated to the moments that changed everything irrevocably. Together with the three main actors, we are reminded of how fragile our personal and social lives can be when faced with the “big nothing” of a malignant disease.

Working conditions in the worst-paid jobs in the Czech Republic were examined by journalist Saša Uhlová during six months. She spent several weeks in a hospital laundrette, poultry house, cash register or waste sorting facility. Her experience became the basis of a lived and very personal report of invisible employees working in appalling conditions. Uhlová wrote a series of reports on her project that were published on the Alarm website. Apolena Rychlíková made them into a documentary film consisting of scenes shot at Uhlová's home and video footage taken during her work. Uhlová accompanies the picture with read commentary.

Director Vitaly Manskiy sets off on the trail of the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline to find out what it’s like for ordinary people living in its vicinity. This visually refined road movie, eloquently illustrating the absurd banality of modern Russia, is also an unsettling portrait of a gas line on which most of Europe is reliant.

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.

Part documentary, part mockumentary and part stranger-than-fiction lesson in guerilla tactics, Velvet Terrorists is a quirky profile of three very different men and their former attempts to take down the communist regime of Czechoslovakia – by blowing the hell out of it. Having all spent time in prison for their crimes, one-time bombers Stanislav, Frantisek and Vladimir muse on their personal histories, the fall of the regime and their journey into middle age.

War doesn’t start and end in battlefields; it originates and is buried in peaceful cities. This film delves into the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine, not by focusing on violence, shelling, or the victims, but by reflecting on the military vehicles that either enter or have long been embedded in the lives and minds of people across various countries.

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.

Lesya has committed a crime of passion which brings her a seven-year sentence in one of Odesa’s women’s correctional facilities. She has just given birth to her first child, and now she is entering a world populated only by women: inmates, nurses and wardens, women of all ages, wives and widows, daughters, sisters, pregnant women, and women with children too. If not for the color of the uniform, it would sometimes be hard to tell who is who.

Dalibor K. is an industrial painter, amateur horror maker, the composer of angry songs, painter and a radical neo-Nazi. He is approaching 40, but he is still living with his mother Vera, Aged 63, and is yet to experience the real relationship with a woman. He hates his job, gypsies, Jews, refugees, homosexuals, Merkel, spiders and dentists. He hates his life, but he doesn’t know how to change it.

“Most prisoners like boxes.” The constrained nature of prisons opens up an infinitude of fantasies and free artistic expression. Environment determines means of expression. A project of confrontation and dialogue with artists from the outside shows radical diff erences and a conspiratory divergence from social norms. This essay on imaginary and physical freedom introduces us to the extreme thoughts of our own boundaries and limitations.

Everyone knows something like this is happening. But this is the only experiment to fully demonstrate what excessive openness on the internet means. The filmmaking couple hired youthful-looking (but over 18) actresses to pretend to be prepubescent girls and communicate with strangers who approached them based on their fake accounts. They attracted dozens of men in the first ten days, then hundreds, and finally thousands...

For years, Russia has been trying to rebuild its empire. The hybrid war doctrine introduced by Putin in 2013 assumes attacking Western countries without declaring war. The invasion of Ukraine made us lose our sense of security. A pair of documentary filmmakers from Poland set off on a journey to look for answers to the question about the threats that may face Central and Eastern Europe.

While Ukraine is fighting, how does it affect the rear? For a year and a half, Vitaly Mansky has portrayed his hometown of Lviv, where everyone’s existence is shaped by the Russian missiles’ flight time to their targets.

This documentary takes us to Zambia, a country with significant copper reserves. The state used to mine and sell copper itself. Then its price fell and the mines were forced to privatize in favor of Western multinational companies. While the proceeds used to finance schools, healthcare, and infrastructure, today all the money leaves the country, including generous subsidies from the European Investment Bank. Czech documentary filmmaker Ivo Bystřičan and cameraman Jiří Málek come to see what the situation, which seems to be taken straight out of the daily news in the Western world, really looks like. We are used to looking at the so-called Third World through the eyes of passionate activists fighting poverty and all kinds of humanitarian organizations. The Copper Age, on the other hand, soberly shows that we should be more interested in what this "selfless" aid looks like in practice.

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.

A prominent Czech journalist Saša Uhlová leaves her family and joins “cheap labour force” in Western Europe. Undercover, she works at an asparagus farm in Germany, tries her hand as a maid at a hotel in Ireland and takes care of the elderly in France. She experiences first-hand the struggles of Eastern European low-wage workers whose sacrifice and hard work allow for the Western society’s comfort. What is the real price that Europe pays for exploiting its own citizens? How do the lives of economic migrants, who have been forced to leave their children and elderly parents, look like? And why are privileged Europeans looking the other way?

On February 24, 2022, Yevhen, together with his friends, volunteered to join the first aid squad on the front line. They provided life-saving support and evacuation of the wounded. This film reveals the experiences of these young men for six months full of drama, despair, fear, hatred, bitterness, love, and, most importantly, faith in victory.

From the makers of legendary CZECH DREAM, a hilarious documentary about a hoax hypermarket, comes CZECH PEACE, a new playfully explosive flm about the mayor of a small Czech village and his attempts to foil the American plan to build its 762nd military base right on his doorstep. The players in this story are everyone from villagers to George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, peace activists and lobbyists representing American arms manufacturers. Can the Mayor of Trokavec (population 80) take the US on? CZECH PEACE shows the workings of geopolitics and the way they affect the little people. The personal clashes with the impersonal, the specifc with the universal, and an individual with the so-called great history.

Author's view of the causes and phenomena that are still moving by the Czech public, the authors mediate in a novel and non-publicistic way thanks to new and often unexpected connections.