Sex O’Clock

Gerta grows up in 1930s Brno in a mixed Czech-German family, which brings her into conflict with her father as he embraces Nazi ideology. Despite this, they remain connected through their shared love of music. During the occupation, Gerta joins the student resistance with her beloved Karel, but the war takes everything from her and leaves her with a dark secret that shapes her future. After the war, though innocent, Gerta is violently forced into the wild expulsion and must leave her hometown with her infant daughter. She survives the hardest years on a rural farm, reunites with Karel, and returns to Brno hoping for a normal life—yet the past continues to haunt her. The two-part TV film Gerta Schnirch offers a personal view of 20th-century history through the fate of a woman caught between two worlds.

In the 1920s, Tomas Baťa and his stepbrother Jan Antonín Baťa, entrepreneurs from Zlin, Czechoslovakia, began establishing new cities worldwide to expand their business. Over the next decades, about fifty towns were built on their unique social and architectural model, but only a few remain today. Our film explores the lives of people in these surviving “Bata cities”: Zlín in the Czech Republic, Bata-Borovo in Croatia, Batanagar in India, Bataypora in Brazil, and Batadorp in the Netherlands. Characters like Matea, Shona, Bé, Henrik, and Věra, despite their differences, are linked by their shared history. The film questions how the vision of a brilliant business dreamer has evolved nearly 100 years later.

A surprisingly intimate portrait of how the dream of running one’s own business can take on monstrous contours. Managed by the father of one of the singers, over the course of five years the girl band 5Angels had reached the gates of pop fame. But it is a path paved not only with the songs of Michal David, but also with the dogged determination of a man who loses any notion of where his role as manager ends and his role as parent begins. An emotionally moved Karel Gott, five angelic girls, and one overly involved father, thanks to whom the behind-the-scenes pre-Christmas atmosphere melts away just as rapidly as the fat should disappear from the belly. “A singer can’t be a lard bucket!”