Václav Havel

A bitter sweet comedy that follows a highly appointed Chancellor who set to step down from his position after years of service to his country. With just two last days left to enjoy his palatial villa before he is finally evicted, his situation gradually goes from bad to worse.

The film Mečiar is the confession of the young director Tereza Nvotová about Vladimír Mečiar and the influence that this politician had on Slovak society, but also on the life of Tereza herself. When the totalitarian communist regime fell in Czechoslovakia in 1989, Tereza was one year old. The leaders of the Gentle Revolution then decided to hold an audition for the Minister of the Interior, to which Vladimír Mečiar, an unknown business lawyer from the Slovak countryside at the time, applied. After success in bankruptcy, Vladimír Mečiar reaches the political top, from where he rules the country with a series of questionable practices. Against the background of events such as the division of Czechoslovakia or the kidnapping of the son of the president of the Slovak Republic, Tereza and her peers relive their childhood.

This quirky documentary follows Vaclav Havel on an eye-opening journey across his native Czechoslovakia in the days before he became president of the Czech Republic. A leading playwright, essayist, intellectual and political dissident in 1985, Havel decides to explore the limits of the secret police by traveling and visiting a variety of friends. Along the way, he's thrown in jail twice and followed by hundreds of undercover cops.

The movie is based on the narrative of a Czech multimillionaire who achieved success not by stripping companies, making crooked deals and crony-ism, but by blazing his own trail like Schweikesque self-made man. He realizes early on that he has nobody but himself to rely on. During the totalitarian regime of the 80s, he ambles along his oddball path and then experiences the Velvet Revolution atypically, too - in an asylum amidst nut-cases. After the Revolution, he really gets rolling. To Germany and back. To prison and back. To China and back. The intriguing and endless opportunities afforded by the Internet eventually blossom into virtual prosperity. The hero has everything and is even planning a highly unorthodox family. A happy ending is nigh, until everything goes up in smoke, of course...

Two TV Plays by Vaclav Havel, one called 'Audience', and one called 'Private View'.

Documentary about Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner Wisława Szymborska.

A dissident Czechoslovakian playwright awaits trial for his activities against the current political regime.

A TV drama originally written by Vaclav Havel.

Taking a cue from Franz Kafka's "Letter to My Father," this highly personal film follows Czech director Jan Nemec as he attempts to engage in a dialogue with his deceased mother. While alive, Nemec's mother had a troubled relationship with her son; this rumination seems to be Nemec's public platform for coming to terms with unresolved familial issues. The director embellishes his film by linking personal events with 20th century history.

The first part of the block will be dedicated to the monograph Vojtěch Jasný: The Film Poet in Exile (2020) authored by the film historian Jiří Voráč. The monograph is centered on the legendary director’s life and career after his emigration to Western Europe and to the US after 1968, which have so far received little attention. In exile, Jasný established himself as a film director (he authored over thirty cinema and TV films and documentaries), stage director, photographer, and film studies lecturer. The first part will be followed by the screening of Jasný’s documentary Why Havel? co-produced by himself and Miloš Forman in Canada and Czechoslovakia in 1991. As remarkable as this reflection of the paradoxical transformation of a dissident into a president in the carnival-like atmosphere of the euphoric post-revolution period with the first question marks already appearing may be, it did not meet the expectations of the head of state.

Unlike any other opera, the so-called Beggar's Opera is not just one composition, but a lineage of adapted compositions, beginning with the original hugely successful 1728 political satire written by Englishman John Gay. Composers and writers have penned variations on it ever since. The most famous of these was A Threepenny Opera by Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Some things these compositions share in common is their setting among the poor and criminal classes, and the roguish character Macheath. This production is based on an adaptation of Gay's original by Vaclav Havel the freedom-fighter, writer and philosopher who became the first (and only) president of the united post-communist country of Czechoslovakia, and it retains many traces of its theatrical origins. Film reviewers were not too tolerant of what they called "slavish adherence" to the noted Czech writer's stage production, but theater, philosophy and history buffs may feel otherwise.

Hate has many faces: racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, sectarianism, domestic violence. But do we really understand its roots, and are there practical ways to cope with it? What is hate doing to us? And what does hate do for us?

John the Baptist finds himself in a Holešovice silo, a wanderer roams across Prague´s brownfields and several women face their fathers.

A personal and political biography of the Octopus, or the Prague National Library project, but also a biography of the last years of the life of the author of this design, Jan Kaplický, who wrote in his diary in 1998: to win the competition and have one love. With this entry, read by Eliška Kaplicky at the beginning of the film, it is as if the world-class Czech architect wrote not only the "script" for the final decade of his life, but also for a film that follows the dramatic social story of creative imagination and the intimate relationship between a man and a woman.

After imprisonment, Vanék can only take the worst work on a small village brewery.

A first-hand account of the tumultuous events of 1989 when a student-led revolution succeeded in overthrowing Czechoslovakia's repressive Communist regime. The film, which includes rare government and underground footage, follows the lives of three Czechoslovak students whose leadership helped ignite the 'Velvet Revoution' and eventually establish a democratic government. Directed by Oscar-winner Allan Miller, it features interviews with students, activists and the country's new president, Vaclav Havel.

Jurácek's feature debut is shot in two parts. In the first, a corporal accompanies a new recruit with a sore Achilles tendon for his physical, and all the girls or young women they see are played by the same actress (Ruzickova). In the longer second segment, shot with the help of the Czechoslovakia army, the soldiers pass the time during basic training and maneuvers by talking about girls.

A visual dreamscape of Prague streets, a hallucinatory vision of a world from the operating table for robotic heart surgeries, collaged together with the stories narrated by the mysterious Dr. B, who is a gifted surgeon at the centre of a conspiracy and a criminal ring trafficking in human parts, especially hearts. Because that’s where the world has ended up – humans thirsting for endless lives and shadowy businessmen and dealmakers taking advantage of this hunger. Set to original music by Němec’s student and fellow filmmaker Petr Marek and his band Midi Lidi, the rich soundscape of the film creates a distinct counterpart to the freewheeling visuals shot digitally in 3D. The former Czech president Václav Havel makes an appearance in the film recalling a script he wrote in the 1960s with Němec, his distant cousin, which the present film utilises as a reflecting surface.

A bitter comedic-drama centering around Tomas, a former promising young director who must cope with a commerce driven world he no longer wants to participate in.

A recording of the legendary production “Audience“ from the Prague Drama Club with Josef Abrhám and Pavel Landovský. In 1975, Václav Havel worked as a labourer in the brewery in Trutnov; he could do nothing else. And it was here that he made perhaps his most successful one-act play, Audience, about the writer Ferdinand Vanek, who is invited by his superior to offer him a deal - a promotion to warehouse keeper, but in return has to inform on himself for StB reports.

Play for Today is a British television anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted. The individual episodes were between fifty and a hundred minutes in duration.

Theatre 625 is a British television drama anthology series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC2 from 1964 to 1968. It was one of the first regular programmes in the line-up of the channel, and the title referred to its production and transmission being in the higher-definition 625-line format, which only BBC2 used at the time.

In-depth interviews with hard-hitting questions and sensitive topics being covered as famous personalities from all walks of life talk about the highs and lows in their lives.

The Lost World of Communism is a three-part British documentary series which examines the legacy of Communism twenty years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Produced by Peter Molloy and Lucy Hetherington, the series takes a retrospective look at life behind the Iron Curtain between 1945 and 1989, focusing on three countries in the Eastern Bloc - East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Through film and television footage and the personal recollections of those who lived in these countries, the series offers a glimpse of what daily life was like during the years of Communist rule. The Lost World of Communism debuted on BBC Two on Saturday 14 March 2009 at 9:00pm. There is also a book which accompanies the series.