Máme na víc

33-year-old Roman decides to tackle his drug addiction by undergoing group therapy as part of a community holed up on an isolated farm in the Šumava mountains. Twelve people, men and women of varying ages and social status, voluntarily subject themselves to a tough regime under the supervision of three therapists. Many of them have stared death in the face already – overdoses, suicide attempts, and aggression heightened by the use of hard drugs, outwardly affecting even the strongest of them. Each brings something of his past into the group, which he has to experience again, both for himself and for those assembled. Past anguish, wrongs and guilt give rise to new problems: in this thickening atmosphere of suspicion and lies, who can still be trusted? This intimate psychological drama deliberately sets out to break up the tight narrative form through retrospectives in which we learn about the past life of each individual.

A poetic, but chilling story of seven puppets in train car prior to its journey to a concentration camp.

Amidst today’s urban jungle of concrete, glass and metal, it is easy to forget that we actually live in the territory formerly dominated by wildlife. Many of its members have been exterminated by humans, while others have fled the sprawling urbanization to the surrounding countryside. It is their survival strategies that get revealed in exciting detail in the documentary series, Planet Czechia. For two years, a team of camera operators headed by Jan Hošek were recording a life cycle of Prague’s wild animal world across all seasons of the year. The film, accompanied by the commentary read by the actor Jiří Macháček, registers everyday struggles of the fat dormouse, the mouflon, blackbirds or the water hen, teaching the viewers in a casual manner a higher degree of tolerance toward the city’s overlooked inhabitants.

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).

Vašek learns that he is dying, so he steals a painting and goes to Rome to sell it – he needs money for a healer. Sitting on a train with a fake mustache on his face, he has no idea that he has, in fact, been sent on a spiritual quest of his life by a beautiful girl. His pursuers look as if they were transported from a 1970’s movie, yet his attention is constantly drawn to the other passengers, who pull him into their own stories with no mercy. Vašek slowly gets lost in a colorful chaos of other people’s destinies, opinions and his own dreams. In the end, his train will take some of them to hell, others to enlightenment or a bizarre epiphany. The film takes a humorous view on all the basic philosophical questions we have heard so many times but that we have yet to find the answers to.

Czech Photographer Josef Koudelka grew up behind the Iron Curtain and always wanted to know "what was on the other side". Forty years after capturing the iconic images of the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, the legendary Magnum photographer arrives in Israel and Palestine. On first seeing the nine-meter-high wall built by Israel in the West Bank, Koudelka is deeply shaken and embarks on a four-year project in the region which will confront him once again with the harsh reality of violence and conflict. Director Gilad Baram, Koudelka's assistant at the time, follows him on his journey through the Holy Land from one enigmatic and visually spectacular location to another.

1940. On the border between Latvia and the USSR, a woman is killed in front of her house as she tried to protect her son from the liberating attack of the Soviets. Almost 80 years later, the archive photo bearing witness to this news item and representing a collateral victim of the European Union’s founding conflict forms the starting point for a journey undertaken by Davis Sīmanis. He navigates from one side to the other of this border, which today represents another separation, one that is geographical but also cultural: between Europe and Russia.

Schmitke is an old German wind turbine engineer. One day, he is dispatched to the Czech side of the Ore Mountains to fix an old squeaking wind turbine. His colleague disappears and mysterious things begin to happen in the forest.

A dark comedy about humankind’s desire to love and to be loved. Centred around neediness, intimacy and romance. Told through a series of loosely connected, tender and absurd scenes, the film follows people who are searching for closeness and acceptance. In a world that preaches self-control, the film explores the sides we try to hide, such as feeling needy and pathetic. The stories overlap and reappear, gradually forming a portrait of collective longing.

Flexible, powerful, and naive. The fates of three men intersect at the launch of Czechoslovak television broadcasting. Ambitious actor František Filipovský has no idea that his casual improvisation on the theme of "the miser" will go down in history. For Minister of Information Václav Kopecký, it is a moment of great nervousness: will he convince his comrades that television broadcasting is the golden goose of communist propaganda? A young television technician is fascinated by the "remote transmission of images and sound" – he has a job he never dreamed of. But can a person fulfill their dreams in communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s without getting involved with the regime?

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?

Near us, nature takes back what man has stolen. Within the environment of open cast brown coalmines and spoil tips which are the reminder of a lunar landscape, one finds paradoxically a true tale of an impregnable wild countryside.

Jan calls himself Buffalo. He loves cowboys, he’s blind, and may lose his hearing. The documentary follows his journey to America to visit the chief of the Navajo tribe, who wants to perform a ritual to help his hearing. The film is full of unpretentious humor thanks to Jan’s charisma. In the USA, he’s like the Don Quixote of the Wild West - a naive adventurer in a world that is much more ordinary than his imagination. This observational, but not standoffish, film is also an example of how the medium of film can relate to blind people by constantly showing the difference between what Jan perceives and what we actually see.

The opening of The Vasulka Effect couldn’t be more apt: Steina Vasulka addresses her husband Woody through various TV screens. He does the same and replies. A perfect image of the relationship between the free-spirited, groundbreaking pioneers of video art. After meeting in Prague in the early 1960s, they relocated from Czechoslovakia to New York, where they later founded The Kitchen, their legendary art and performance gallery.

From his truck, rising online star Štefan Pongo streams his political rants and creates social media movements that go viral, in support of Romani people across Europe.

The desire for freedom during Czechoslovakia’s Normalization period brought together people professing a deep inclination towards principles of the underground movement. Now, decades later, they can’t face their mutual suspicions of betrayal – of having cooperated with the state security police. Drifting throughout is the memory of their tragically departed guru, philosopher and poet Marcel Strýko. To try to come to terms with the past, an old companion from Prague organizes a revival concert in a Gothic cathedral. Will this reunion of freethinkers finally lead to repentance and forgiveness?