Zdeněk Troška

In a time when girls were forbidden to study religious scriptures, a Jewish girl masquerades as a boy to enter religious training and unexpectedly finds love along the way.

The story of Doctor Čeněk Dobešek - a decent, kind man who seems almost out of place in today’s world. Though he’s a conscientious physician, he hasn’t learned to exploit his calling for personal gain the way many of his former classmates or hospital colleagues do. Happily settled in a modest two-room apartment with his lovely wife Zuzana and his dreadful mother-in-law Marie Košvancová, Čeněk cheerfully drops everything at any hour to answer the doorbell and tend to whoever needs him. His humble generosity scandalizes Marie, who’d much rather have a “real” Doctor as a son-in-law: someone famous, wealthy, and who never works for free, unlike Čeněk.

Two clumsy devils Popelák and Uhelák, punished by the ruler of hell, embark on a journey to bring two sinful souls from earth.

The parents decided to send two twins, Honza, and Martin, on vacation to their grandfather.

Matej and Jenda, two of the eight children of the poor Pelc family in the Giant Mountains, help in a glass works where the oldest brother Francek works. They hide into a tub not to be seen by supervisors checking on the ban of children labor. They miss the Epiphany carol (songs and treats door-to-door) and all neighbor village boys again on them in all the neighbor houses. On their way home they are passed by a fast moving big man with a large backpack. The boys send the customs officers, who are pursuing the strange man, to the opposite direction. The man then thanks them and rewards them the next day. Based on fairy-tales and legends the boys think the man is Krakonos (the giant living and ruling in the Giant Mountains).

The trenches of World War I provide for a captivating backdrop to the drama of Corporal Hoferik. In his devotion to the Habsburg Monarchy, he fanatically carries out his military orders, but he ultimately suffers the Empire's disfavor.

Copying videos illegally on a mass scale is one thing, but making a marketable product out of them is quite another. Just think of the most basic problem: language – your average customer won’t be a polyglot! The answer to that problem all over Central and Eastern Europe was a practice called rychlodabing, or speed dubbing in Czech, which consisted of one sole actor voicing all characters, with the original voices usually still audible beneath. This is how millions of people in the ČSSR encountered many forms of cinema for the first time in the 1980s, and how many foreign words became lodged (in a corrupted fashion) in everyday language. Some expressions (often curse words) were born. That’s popular culture at its liveliest. Video Kings is an oral history monument to the art of rychlodabing and some of its masters, as well as a collective reminiscence from a time of political transformation, and how ordinary people were agents of that change in extraordinary ways.

In a South Bohemian village in the middle of silver ponds and dark forests lives Jindřich (Radek Valenta), who one day goes out into the world with a firm decision to free the cursed princess. On the way, he reaches a haunted mill, where the beautiful Eliška (Andrea Černá) lives with her father. Eliška likes the young man, so she tells him that the cursed princess is in the pond and Jindřich remains in the mill as a helper. However, the devil and the waterman, who like Eliška, don't like that. With the help of various intrigues and incantations, they try to expel Jindřich from the mill, but soon a third groom appears there - an old rich man. However, since Eliška rejects all the suitors, the miller's father gets angry and gives her an ultimatum: either she chooses a suitor herself by the full moon, or the one who asks for her hand first gets her. So a fight ensues between the grooms...