King Does Nothing

A moving account, in his own words, of the personal life and work of the brilliant Czech filmmaker Miloš Forman (1932-2018): his tragic childhood, his major contribution to the cultural movement known as the Czech New Wave, his exile in Paris, his troubled days in New York, his rise to stardom in Hollywood; a complete existence in the service of cinema.

Honza was born in 1974 into the cheerless era of socialism in Czechoslovakia. At that time, his parents Jana and Petr lived in one room in the apartment of Jana's divorced mother and her widowed grandmother. A few years later, the family moved from Prague to Liberec where Petr found a job and a little house for the family. When Honza was born, his father began writing a family chronicle and he has continued to do so for 37 years. "Private Universe" show not only the life of one ordinary family, but also how the Czech society has changed in last four decades. Who are we, where do we come from and where do we go?

An intimate portrait of a man on the edge of society, filmed over the course of twenty years.

Set history free. A modern history, enclosed for more than a quarter of a century in an abandoned prison in Uherské Hradiště with unique rooms preserved from the 1950s. The authors fill the emptiness of the premises with situational encounters with the building, nature and people who are united by their experience of the place and who are often divided by their life experience. A shared past as a starting point to a shared future.

Eighty-year-old Paul Erling Johnson is a man most people might walk past, never guessing he was once a seafaring adventurer and famous boat designer.

The memory of World War II is the only thing that makes a small Russian town alive. Like a great treasure this memory is preserved here in every home and is passed on from generation to generation. Yet exactly this memory prevents people from understanding that despite their own will they are getting involved in a new war.

This film traces the life of Jan Kapr, a prominent Czech composer of the 20th century. A documentary opera with an ambitious libretto and playful and refined editing work, Kapr Code is an unexpected celebration of creativity that shakes up our ideas of biography and pays tribute to the importance of resisting homologation and censorship through art and creation.

A pig farm in Lety, South Bohemia would make an ideal monument to collaboration and indifference, says writer and journalist Markus Pape. Most of those appearing in this documentary filmed in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, France, Germany and Croatia have personal experience of the indifference to the genocide of the Roma. Many of them experienced the Holocaust as children, and their distorted memories have earned them distrust and ridicule. Continuing racism and anti-Roma sentiment is illustrated among other matters by how contemporary society looks after the locations where the murders occurred. However, this documentary film essay focuses mainly on the survivors, who share with viewers their indelible traumas, their "hole in the head".

For Tomáš the mine is the centre of his life, along with soccer, his kids and the cosy after-work beer. The 44-year-old has worked as a miner for 21 years, until the mine was closed down for economic reasons. Tomáš then re-trains as a coder in the appropriately named educational programme “New Shift”. What he doesn’t know yet is that his new skills alone won’t get him out of the crisis. A film about a tug-of-war with fate and the employment market.

Eliseé survived the Rwandan genocide as a child. Today he leads an orphan acrobat group in a country, which heavily relies on foreign aid. He cares for the orphaned children and wants them to be happy, to have some sense in their lives. Rosta Novák built a worldwide-acclaimed circus group in Prague, where he successfully rules with a firm, paternal hand, but has permanently dark under-eye circles from the workload. The majority of Rwandese think that all people in Europe are fairy rich. On the other hand, many Europeans think that it is necessary to help Africa with everything. What happens, if we merge these two worlds in a film, during the preparation of a joint circus performance? What are the true motivations of our protagonists and what does it tell us about the Africa-Europe relationship? And who actually helps whom, in the end?

Documentary film about Czech actress Lida Baarova, who fell in love with Joseph Goebbels in the 30s.

Jiří, a Czech physicist and a visionary handyman, has an idea on how to save the planet. But no one will listen to him. His daughter, Marta, a musician and mother of two, is annoyed at this. She takes her camera and goes "out into the world" with her dad. She wants to see if the world could work just as Jiri had envisioned it. Humor is brought to the film as they showcase their combined and inventive strategies on how they should present their idea and to whom.

Sonia Maletzová's documentary film portrait follows the legend of the Czechoslovak music scene, rock keyboardist Marian Varga (1947-2017), at the end of his life, when he was diagnosed with a terminal illness. It captures the great introvert and avid smoker during his last performances, when he slowly began to lose his breath.