Olga is a complex young woman desperate to break free from her unfeeling family and social conventions. With her Louise Brooks-like tomboyish looks she drags herself, chain-smoking, from one job to another until she appears to find her niche as a truck driver. Although she has female lovers she does not form a bond with any of them; instead she clashes, time and again, venting herself in wordless emotional outbursts and other behavioural extremes.
Lena is a 17-year-old girl from a middle-class family who is experiencing her first love: secret night adventures and magical morning walks along the Danube. However, her dream world is shattered when she is raped. Withdrawing, she ultimately attempts to slit her wrists. Her family, helpless, entrusts her to a psychiatric institute.
The bond between a father and a daughter is imperilled by matters that go unspoken and hurts that are slow to heal.
Two students from the Czech Film Academy commission a leading advertising agency to organize a huge campaign for the opening of a new supermarket named Czech Dream. The supermarket however does not exist and is not meant to. The advertising campaign includes radio and television ads, posters, flyers with photos of fake Czech Dream products, a promotional song, an internet site, and ads in newspapers and magazines. Will people believe in it and show up for the grand opening?
Behind the closed doors of their room, two brothers share a secret of self-discovery. But when the elder Marek starts growing up, bringing his childish curiosity to an end, he realizes that they’ve crossed the boundaries of brotherly love – something that the younger David is still unable to understand...
A weary old man is getting ready to die. He has nothing more to fear and decides to share the secret of his life with us. While his relatives wait outside the door, eager to get a share from what was once his, he takes us on a journey through his memories. What will be the ultimate truth he chooses to pass on?
"The Kite" is a short puppet animated film for kids. It talks about the issue of death, but in a simple metaphoric and symbolic way. It tries to explain the fact that none of us are here forever and all living creatures must die, but on the other hand, to show, that someone's journey doesn't have to end with death.
Yallah! Underground follows some of today’s most influential and progressive artists in Arab underground culture from 2009 to 2013 and documents their work, dreams and fears in a time of great change for Arab societies. In a region full of tension, young Arab artists in the Middle East have struggled for years to express themselves freely and to promote more liberal attitudes within their societies. During the Arab Spring, like many others of this new generation, local artists had high hopes for the future and took part in the protests. However, after years of turmoil and instability, young Arabs now have to challenge both old and new problems, being torn between feelings of disillusion and a vague hope for a better future.
An adaptation of one of the most famous horror poems of all time. How, in a fever dream, a carver finishes the portrait of a young woman. Then suddenly something flies into the workshop and strange things start happening. Stop-motion animation is combined with live action to create a terrifying experience from flesh, blood, wood and feathers.
Adults reflect on the experience of losing a parent at a young age.
The architects' plans for Central Bus Station to swallow visitors has turned into an endless maze of corridors. Once a gift to the citizens of Tel Aviv now serves to the immigrants. Yonathan has been a guide there for 17 years and is able to show the other side of the station's significance to those who walk with him. Yonathan knows that the purpose of going down to the building is to find not only himself, but also a society that harbours its values, protects its original traditions and wants to defend its home.
Like many others, Daniil has decided to leave his native Georgia and move to Prague in search of better pay. Originally a teacher, he finds a job with Ukrainian laborers controlled by a Russian boss called Sergei and thus becomes a cog in the machinery that takes advantage of the work of illegal immigrants… Vinland looks at the lives of people who exist all around us but about whom we know so little because their identities disappear the moment they relinquish their passports to the mafia who are interested only in profit.
A meditative film explores the effects that examining consciousness and a microscopic view of one’s inner self have on the rationalism that scientists are expected to have. Even though each has a different approach, a physicist and an economist have similar, indescribable experiences, which they can only show through ‘reflections’. Efforts to change a flat map into an actual landscape lead to an unaffected re-examination of the foundations of our society, in which the myth of objectivity often covers up the manipulation of the powers-that-be, and the desire for deeper knowledge may be the driving force for the military industrial complex just as much as for getting a degree.
Futnet - a game similar to volleyball, played with one's feet, and on a tennis court - originated in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s. Now played internationally, village tournaments are still considered a point of pride.
A story about a girl, a foreign worker employed at a printing house. A boy and several men long for the girl, but they do not meet even the girl’s low demands. Her current boyfriend (and superior) is cheating on her, her new admirer at work is currently homeless, and the third man is probably a liar.
In a small village in the south of the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, filmmaker Kateřina Turečková meets 16-year-old Ben, interested in learning about their newly discovered trans identity in person. Ben seeks refuge for their true feelings in cyberspace, finding moments of happiness by using green-screen technology to imagine their possible future. The film indirectly captures the (mis)understanding and (non-)acceptance Ben faces at school, its focused insight rounded out by the filmmaker’s interviews with Ben’s mother and sister, who inadvertently embody everything Ben hates about themself.
Another dreary day in a small town. Viki, Sára, and Kiki, three inseparable friends since childhood, are planning to spend their free afternoon the same way they always do: vodka, cigarettes, talking about everything and nothing. But their group dynamic is different today, more explosive: one of them has reached the second round in a casting call for a modeling job, thus raising her chances of leaving this place of dashed hopes and dreams. Her friends might be willing to support her, if only their anger, sadness, and envy weren’t so powerful… A relentless but non-judgmental look at growing up without any prospects of a brighter future.
Childlike imagination, naive playfulness and an enchanted view of the world are at the centre of this poetic film. The child protagonists talk about their dreams, fantasies and experiences while touching on metaphysical questions of body and soul, life and death. Magic permeates every frame of this colourful collage.
