Jakub, The Old Believers, and Piemule are three documentaries about forgotten people by director Jana Sevciková. All three are distributed on the same DVD under the name Old Believers. Piemule offers a close look at the descendants of Czech immigrants in Romania.
A zoologist and a biochemist go out into an oilfield with a cameraman and filmmaker to observe and study the elusive oil gobblers.
The initiation of a young Jewish child into Guernica's world.
The young Marta has made a break in her medical education to fully invest in her career as a model. We follow her for a day in her life, almost completely without hearing her voice. It is seldom that Marta gets the space to speak, instead she is mostly subject to the voice of others.
Three separate short stories by Jan Drda from the collection The Dumb Barricade: The Dynamite Watchman, Hatred and Traces.
Symbols and political analogies abound in this dramatically frustrating first work by a recent film-school graduate. In the story, Vojtech has survived World War II in a Czech prison following an unjust sentence. Now he is free, and the world is full of possibilities.
Final train station turnes out to be something much more different...
Short musical comedy from Tomas Vorel.
Young Eugene from the provinces travels to Prague in search of fame. Once there he gets an offer to write engagé lyrics for pop songs...
Jan Schmidt and Pavel Juráček turn their attention to the problem of Czechoslovakia's unloved cars in this whimsical documentary short.
Fati Farari, a black man from Africa, is completing his studies in classical piano at the Music Academy of Prague. It's the day before his first solo concert, where he is going to play Bach. While he strolls around the city he is thinking, not so much about the concert as about himself, both as a lonely foreigner and as a human being in cosmos. Here and there he encounters some racist comments, but mostly he just feels the weight of social exclusion because of his otherness, especially when it comes to women. On the morning of the day for his concert the embassy informs him that his whole family has perished. He feels totally broken, although he thinks that everyone holds some pain inside. His piano teacher, a professor at the Academy, looks him up, and tells him that he heard what has happened. The professor advises him to communicate his feelings that evening by using his Bach.
On a sunny afternoon an old man speaks to a laundress about his love for Provence, then a black flag is unfurled outside the town monument: news has arrived over the radio that the famous composer Foerster, born in the town, has just died.
In this six-minute short, a man’s attempt to burgle a home is interrupted by a child.
Zdeněk Zaoral began filming this film in semi-amateur conditions, but it was eventually completed in a Zlín studio and released in cinemas. At its time, in the second half of the 1980s, it was the first completely open and also unusually raw statement about the course and consequences of drug addiction. The story of an eighteen-year-old girl who tries to escape her habit shows documentary values - both in the staging and in the speech of the individual characters, in the authenticity of the drug-addicted environment.
In a series of juxtaposed images and sounds, Jaromil Jireš comments on the tragic premature death of thousands as well as their posterity due to the atomic bomb.
