Frank visits his friend Josef, who introduces him to his pedigree rabbits and his wife Mary. Frank is more interested in the slightly unsettling fact that Josef and Mary's garden fence is entirely made up of living people holding hands.
From the behavior, discourse, and appearance of individual actors, Vachek composes, in the form of a mosaic, a broad and many-layered film-argument about Czechoslovak democracy in the period of its rebirth, all administered with the director’s inimitable point of view.
Karel Vachek’s graduate film offers us a documentary essay which is both a light-hearted and aggressive little piece and also a parody of investigative film journalism. The Strážnice folk festival, backed by the cultural Party apparatus of the time, for years had little to commend itself to...
A man plays the Bach piece of the title on the organ, accompanied by images of stone walls with cracks and holes that grow and shrink, intercut with images of doors and wire-meshed windows.
A man, apparently on the run, takes shelter in a dilapidated house. Every day, he drills a hole through a wall and looks into one of the rooms, each time seeing a different surreal vision.
Documentary showing the Czechoslovakian political landscape in March 1968, when president Antonin Novotny, a hardline Stalinist, stepped down and moderate communist Ludvik Svoboda was elected. Five months later, in August 68, the Prague Spring would end with the military intervention of the Warsaw...
The themes of anarchy and individualism that run through Věra Chytilová’s work begin here, in an almost docu-realist look at women finding freedom and joy amid the rigid conformity of life in a communal factory dormitory.
A leading director of the Czech film renaissance provides a philosophical meditation on life and death, set amidst complex hospital apparatus and the sadness, hope, or resignation of the patients. Existentialist rather than optimist, the approach is one of humanistic atheism, accepting death as...
"A refined film essay about the loneliness, wisdom and humility of old women. The film, most valued by Jan Špáta, was awarded the Grand Prize at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, the Trilobit Award and Special Mention at the IFF in Karlovy Vary."
The work of actors on a stage makes a dreamlike parallelism between artistic immagination and the concreteness of everyday life. Tribute to Prague's Divadlo na zàbradlì, theater that has been a point of reference for Theater of the Absurd in Czechoslovakia in Sixties
The film acquaints us with the work of the senior consultant of pavilion 11 in the Bohnice mental house who endeavours to build up a complex rahabilitation and re-socialising programme for patients with chronic mental illness. One part of her treatment programme is a week's stay outside the...
This is funny or rather crazy adaptation of classical opera Carmen inspired by famous czech theatre Ypsilon play of the same name shot at various bizarre locations such as airport, botanical garden and winter forest.
