Good-natured and garrulous, Schweik becomes the Austrian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of World War I -- although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it. Playing cards and getting drunk, he uses all his cunning and...
The Stolen Airship (Czech: Ukradená vzducholod) is a 1967 live-action/animated film by Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman. The story is based loosely on Jules Verne's novels Two Years' Vacation and The Mysterious Island. The film in Art Nouveau style consists of live-action scenes, generally shot in...
An anti-war black comedy set during the Thirty Years' War. It follows ploughman Petr, recruiter Matěj and country girl Lenka who get caught up in both sides of the war and experience many adventures before they find happiness. The film combines live action with animation to suggest the artistic...
The Emperor's mismanagement of his country is provoking some in his court to plot to overthrow him. He feels successful, at least, when he discovers the legendary Golem, which he believes can protect him and even cure his imaginary illnesses but, when he disappears while on a bender, his kindly...
An anthology of three absurd, ironic tales inspired by Čapek’s “Tales from One Pocket” and “Fables and Side Stories,” each showing uncanny forces disrupting ordinary lives: in Krejčík’s “Glorie,” a gentle clerk is haunted by a sudden halo; the other two segments by Mach and...
It's very human and nice story about lofty princess (her father is amiable but incapable - unforgettable performance of S. Neumann) and good, nice, kind and well-principled young king (prince) who tries to make tender her calm heart to get married with her. After being refused (she's very...
Prague in the 1870s. Work in Smolík's sulphur factory is hard and dangerous to health. The poorly paid workers resemble torches because their clothes are soaked with poisonous phosphorus. Young Josef Rezler also works in the sulphur factory and uses his earnings to feed his mother and little...
The sad hero of the story, Petr, an ordinary lawyer in a construction company, is crowded into a small apartment in Žižkov with his wife and grandparents, desperately struggling with the lack of money. One day he offers an old man a seat on a crowded trolley bus and is generously rewarded for his...
Miroslav Hornicek is a deluded young man who is convinced he is Faust incarnate. This turn of mind leads to some ludicrous situations, such as when he believes a woman is really a cat. Before he can be rounded up and interned wherever they keep people with this type of a problem, love enters his...
A poor miner, Kuba Dařbuján, cares for his wife Markýtka and eleven children. When a newborn arrives, he seeks a godfather and, finding only Death fair to all, accepts a pact: as a doctor whom Death accompanies at the foot of a patient’s bed, he can heal; but if Death stands at the head, no...
During the Nazi occupation of a Czech city civilians are being rounded up on the slightest of pretexts and shot. One day three high school boys who crack jokes about a recently deceased "hero of the Reich" are pulled out of school by the Gestapo.
Jan Zika is the legendary hero of the communist resistance movement during World War II and leading functionary of the second underground Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
