Czech & Slovak films

An apprentice train dispatcher looks for love while aiding his colleagues in their resistance against the Nazis.

A carpenter in the Fascist Slovak State is appointed "Aryan controller" of a Jewish widow's store.

Factory manager gets army reserves to boost female workers' morale. Local beauty spurns them for jazz pianist who seduces her. She leaves for Prague to find him but his parents are displeased when she arrives.

A look at the glamorous life at an old-world Prague hotel.

The life of a small village runs on its own.

Set in the late 1940s, the film concerns the treatment of suspect "bourgeois elements", a professor, a saxophonist, and a milkman, who are put to work in a junkyard for rehabilitation.

An evocation of the childhood memories of Bohumil Hrabal in his provincial town of Nymburk, dominated by the local brewery.

A volunteer fire department throws a party for their former boss with the whole town invited, but nothing goes as planned.

The friends enjoy the charms of nature - and of their guests.

This movie is based on texts of Bohumil Hrabal, world-known Czech prosaic. It's a story (in a form of a mosaic of short episodes and pictures) about the sadness and happiness of inhabitants of Kersko (Kersko is a small woody area full of cottages and roods). These people are both simple and sensitive, they have their own pleasures (e.g. Leli is a collector of cheap, but inutile things) and the greatest delight of all of them is a hunting. Crude poetics of amateur hunting is screened by dreamy pictures of this area. Menzel mixes sentimental lyricism and rough (but not vulgar!) humor and the outcome is the never-ending landscape of continuous life in the proximate nearness of nature. The performances of actors are brilliant. Both Rudolf Hrusinsky as a Franz and Jaromír Hanzlik as a Leli have nonrecurring charm bottomed on a pain and inebriation. Only the music is not perfect: Jiri Sust usually assembled his film music from his older works and in this movie there is many quotations.

The time is 1945-46. 10 year old Eda and his friend Tonda live in a small village outside Prague. In school, their class is so wild and indisciplined that their teacher quits and is replaced by the militant Igor Hnidzo. He is very strict - but also very just. His weakness is his interest in young women.

It is a beautiful Sunday and the Homolka family are having a picnic in a forest not far from Prague. The grandfather and grandmother have settled comfortably in the grass, their son Ludva romps about in the river with his two young twin sons and his podgy wife Hedus dances among the trees, while the beer gets cooled in the water.

The Homolka family celebrates a great occasion: they were finally able to buy a car. They immediately begin to drive for small trips to Hradcany, to the airport, and plan further trips. Their euphoria is spoiled by a letter from their great-grandmother. Their great-grandfather is dying and the family is expected to come along to say goodbye. The annoyed Homolkas therefore set off to the South Bohemian village where the grandparents live.

The husband and wife Ludva and Hedus Homolkas with their twins Péta and Máta and Ludva's parents - the granny and grandpa - arrive in the snowy Spindleruv Mlýn for a holiday. They promise to each other that they will not spoil the quite expensive holiday by quarrels. If somebody hurts the other one he/she will kneel as a punishment.

After two troubled but powerful men rape a young hitchhiker who happens to be a vet, she drugs them and remove their testicles.

After realizing that all world is spoiled, Marie and Marie are committed to be spoiled themselves. They rip off older men, feast in lavish meals and do all kinds of mischief. But what is all this leading to?

A hillbilly inherits millions and goes to the city, leaving his village to live a rich man's life in post-communist Czechia.

This film is about life of a family, which lived in Prague since since 1968 to 1980. Father of the family comes from Ukraine and so every year someone from Ukraine to visit this family and to buy something more better than is in Ukraine. As the times go by, the friens of family live in Austria. And now for change the family visit "a better life" in west Europe and they found out how it is to be something second-rate.

A black comedy based on director Petr Zelenka's successful stage play. It treats a simple theme: Jana has left Petr (Ivan Trojan), a boy 'who's not doing very well at the moment,' and he wants her back. In a film in which love seems like madness (and vice versa) many bizarre things rise to the surface. Petr's mother (Nina Divísková) sends blood to Chechnya. His father (Miroslav Krobot) once did voice-overs for newsreels and his wife forces him to dial a random telephone number in order to find out if people still recognize his voice. Petr's boss (Karel Hermánek) prefers a shop window mannequin to his own vivacious wife, the neighbors enjoy sex only if someone is watching them, and Petr has such lovely eyes... When things in his apartment start to liven up, Petr feels like he's going insane. Or is he the only normal one? Maybe everyone else around him is losing it.

A love between two young people in Czech province is at danger because of a rumour, that causes hatred between their neighbouring families.

The life of a small Czech village is suddenly in turmoil when a college student, Simon, arrives, who is introducing revolutionary innovations in dairy farming.

A mixed group of Czech tourists takes a fun-filled coach tour of sunny Italy.

Two guys bought a car and travelled through the country until they met a lonely girl on the road. So they begin to travel together having so much fun. And there is another guy who has a better car and who is looking for the girl because he is her lover, he is her first one. What is going on inside of this girl? Nobody knows, until the end.

Twist of fate and the twists of mind of the characters (mostly couples) combine in just the right twinkled absurd way in the interweaving episodes of this comedy. Each of the characters gets a good shot at being sarcastic and each is a sorry loser at some point yet none is turned into the butt of the joke. The place is Prague and the time is August 6th, 1995, except for one episode, set 50 years earlier in unflyable rain in the city of Kokura, Japan.

Set in Central Europe during World War II, a demented cremator believes cremation relieves earthly suffering and sets out to save the world.