HVM's Central Europe | iCM Forum

A documentary about Baroness Le Murie who contemplates her lonely life and the dilapidated castle she lives in.

Two families, Sebkovi and Krausovi, are celebrating Christmas, but not everyone is in a good mood. Teenage kids think their fathers are totally stupid; fathers are sure their children are nothing more than rebels, hating anything they say.

Surreal dream-like tale that combines several themes into one fantastical world.

Petr's stepmother steals his inheritance. He meets a duke's daughters, falling for Adelka while the other rejects him. Petr encounters a devil, and they conspire to punish the wicked stepmother and proud daughter.

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

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 life of a small village runs on its own.

People of different age, profession and social status answer two simple questions: who they are and what they want from life.

The old organist unwittingly witnessed the suicide of an unknown man. Before his death, he handed him an envelope with money for his daughter Klara, who lived in the monastery. The organist did not report the case to the authorities, but hid the suicide's corpse in the cellar. Little did he know that he was being followed by his unscrupulous neighbor, a shoe shiner, who then blackmailed him with the threat of a murder charge.

The mayor of OSADNE, Mr. Ladislav Mikulasko, is a political record-holder. He has held the position of the village boss for a respectful thirty-six years. His spiritual counterpart, the Orthodox priest, Peter Soroka, has buried fifty people and christened two children over the past five years. The mayor and priest have decided to fight for the survival of the village, together with their wives who are their important shadow advisers.

Oldrich "Fajolo" Fajták (Marián Bielik), a student who directs quasi-existentialist verbal abuse at his girlfriend Bela Blazejová (Jana Beláková), takes off to a formally volunteer summer work camp at a farm where he meets her grandfather.

A young boy becomes an apprentice for a mysterious sorcerer, working at the sorcerer's strange and sinister mill where secretive black magic is being taught and performed at a very heavy price.

A historic mega-film, one family saga, three generations (1887 -1917) assimilated to the bee community in the hive. The queen bee serves as a big mother that symbolizes the family and national roots, the power and meaning of tradition and the return to it. The mosaic of the bricklaying Pichanda family's lives is made of love, hope, hard work, human understanding and also the tragedies of economic crisis, war and human malice. Dreams, symbols, and life in all its forms create a colored rainbow spanning from birth to death and from mystery to reality and back.

A dramatic story of three friends happily spending time on their own in a mountain cottage in the High Tatras. On the arrival of the wife of one of them their perfect friendship is put to a test.

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

Princess Arabela, the daughter of the King of the fairy tale world escapes before the revenge of a cunning and deceitful magician Rumburak and leaves the world of fairy tales. She meets Petr Majer in the human world and falls in love with him. Spells, a magic ring, the crystal ball, a flying suitcase and magic things play a very important role in the series.

On the eve of a large payment, residents of a collapsing collective farm see their plans turn into desolation when they discover that Irimiás, a former co-worker who they thought was dead, is returning to the community.

A disillusioned 30-something teacher falls out with his father and moves to a derelict house in their family garden. He is then visited by a stunningly beautiful neighbour, famous philosophers, his ex-lover and.

A childless couple passes off an anthropomorphous tree stump as their baby, but things get out of hand when the monstrosity comes to life and demands to be fed.

In a tiny Central European village, voracious wolves kill the members of a ceremony, except the bride who is saved by the 10-year-old groom's brother. That day, she gives birth to a girl and betroths her to her savior. A decade passes and on the girl's birthday, a troupe of female circus performers arrive and the girls finds herself more interested in the young son of the group's owner.

A Czech journalist joins a Prague radio station that broadcasts German propaganda in order to protect his Jewish wife. However, as the German rule over Czechia (then called 'Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia') calls for more and more collaboration, his relationship with his wife spirals downward.

Set in 13th-century central Europe, a young boy joins the Teutonic Knights. Years later, he leaves the Crusaders, pursued by a fanatical comrade. He faces repercussions for rejecting the Holy Order.

Thirty-year-old Libor (Igor Chmela) is the father of two children, a former teacher, now a senior bank executive whose company went bankrupt because fraud by the managers was uncovered. The investigators offer to plea bargain in exchange for Libor's cooperation, and also suggest what all they know about him. Apparently there is plenty for a prison sentence. Libor takes time to reflect and convinces his wife to go away for a few days. Is he fleeing from justice, or does he merely want to delay the moment of truth, when he tells his wife he will have to go to jail? Or is there something else going on entirely?

Father Holy, a village priest, battles against the state and religious bureaucracies of 1980s Czechoslovakia in his fight to raise money for a new church roof. Permeated by his love for the villagers, his encounters are marked by his good humor. In his losing battle against Church and State, Holy is ordered to be transferred away from his parish and his allies. The Czech-American, Milena Jelinek, adapted this moving story from the the novel The Forgotten Light, by the 1930s Czech writer/poet and Catholic priest Jakub Deml. (1934)