Cutting It Short

In 1930s Prague, a Czech cremator who firmly believes cremation relieves one from earthly suffering is drawn inexorably to Nazism.

Former Nazi Klaus Abard survives to the 1990s by taking anti-ageing pills. He plans to use a time travel trip to return to Germany in 1944 and present Hitler with a hydrogen bomb, so that he can win the war. Unfortunately the pilot, woman-chasing Karel Bures, dies on the morning of the trip and his earnest twin brother Jan impersonates him, without knowing about the plot.

In 1897, in a castle near the town of Werewolfville in the Carpithians, a slightly deranged Professor Orfanik experiments with his new inventions which include, even at this early date, television and a film camera. He is also an obsessed opera fan, keeps the body of his favorite diva preserved in a crypt in the castle. In order to keep away nosy visitors, the baron's mad-scientist assistant invents all sorts of spooky phenomena in order to give the castle a creepy reputation.

Jakub, a young, small time drug dealer, wakes up to find the police storming the apartment building while his parents are both away on holiday. After flushing all of his "secret stashes" in the toilet, he finds out they are actually there to investigate the death of the girl upstairs, a close childhood friend of his and the family. He slowly retraces the past week that she has been lying dead in her flat and remembers that he asked her to "receive a package" unbeknownst to her from his drug dealer, Pexeso.

Middle-aged Antonin and his friends, the major, now retired, and the canon, are in the river, swimming and philosophizing. Then it starts to rain. It just seems to be that sort of summer. Antonin runs the swimming bath with his portly wife Katherine... A man appears with his horse-drawn caravan. He lays a striped pole across the river and walks over. With a handstand and a magic trick, Ernie the Conjuror invites everyone to that evening's performance... Ernie is a tightrope walker of only modest skill, but with a slim and beautiful assistant, Anna. Antonin speaks to her. The two spend the night in the change room by the river, Antonin massaging her feet all night long. Katherine decides to move into the caravan with Ernie. But now the major and even the canon sense Anna's attractiveness...

A 20th century man lands on the Moon and discovers that Baron Munchausen has beaten him to it, accompanied by Cyrano de Bergerac and the characters from Jules Verne's novels about the conquest of the satellite.

Set in Prague during the years leading up to World War II, this family saga tells the story of a cobbler named Vincenc Bursik (Vladimir Mensik), who uproots his clan from the country to the city, only to suffer the loss of his wife and the failure of his shoe business within months. When his daughter moves away to go live with a wealthy businessman as his mistress, Vincenc is left to take care of his two sons, who spend their days in a secret garden vying for the affections of a teenage girl.

There are still water spirits among us. One group lives in Prague, led by Mr. Wassermann, who is using his wife's family as a servants. All they need is their old house near the river. But the house is to be demolished. They have to stop it. And the only way is to drown Dr. Mrácek, who is responsible for the demolition. But he falls in love with Wassermann's niece Jana. He changes to fish, is mistaken for water spirit from Germany, is drowned and revived again. The other problem is the flour with ears... and so on...

This futuristic science fiction comedy features an atomic bomb blast that causes women to grow beards and lose the ability to have children. A summit meeting is held at the United Nations, with the proposed solution of building a time machine. The decision is made to travel back in time and murder Einstein, with the hopeful result being that without the noted mathematician's research there will be no atomic bombs.

In the aftermath of war, two men and a woman begin acting more like children than adults, leading to tragedy.

Czechoslovak comedy film directed by Ladislav Smoljak, about the fictional national hero Jára Cimrman (universal genius, inventor, sportsman, criminalist, poet, writer and philosopher).

An only son, Jirí Valenta (Jaromír Hanzlík), has been drafted to the army. At the barracks he acquires the nickname Seamstress because he sews rugs in his spare time. One day, his friend introduces him to Julka Vávrová (Jorga Kotrbová), a girl he is desperate to get rid of. The naive Jirí falls in love with the girl and accepts her invitation to spend Easter together in the country. There he learns that the girl is the single mother of the young boy Martínek, whose father is the married tractor driver.

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 fair. His weakness though, is his interest in young women.

The movie's main storyline follows the life of Otík, a young man, in a tight-knit village community. The sweet-tempered Otík works as an assistant truck driver with Mr. Pávek, his older colleague and practical-minded neighbor. Pávek's family takes care of Otík, whose parents are dead. However, the two coworkers become at odds over Otík's inability to perform even the simplest tasks. Pávek demands that Otík be transferred to assist another driver, who happens to be a choleric and suspicious man named Turek (Turk in Czech). Rather than work with Turek, Otík decides to accept an offer of employment in Prague, but finds he does not fit in to the city life. After discovering that the transfer of Otík to Prague was a trick by a crooked politician to get a deal on Otík's large inherited house, Pávek agrees to give Otík a second chance and retrieves him from the city to resume their work together.

In the 1950s, Ludvik Jahn was expelled from the Communist Party and the University by his fellow students, because of a politically incorrect note he sent to his girlfriend. Fifteen years later, he tries to get his revenge by seducing Helena, the wife of one of his accusers.

When a comet passes the Earth at close range, it pulls a small part of North Africa with it. Carried along are a bunch of people, among them Angelika, who has just escaped from a ruthless weapon dealer's ship, and her two brothers, who are searching for her. Then there's a group of natives planning a rebellion against the French colonists. All conflicts become secondary when the people finally realize that they're doomed to live together on an alien planet. However, this time of peace and happiness won't last for long...

This comedy is about one average family. The father works as master in the factory and his son is studying on high school. One day father must start to visit the evening school. It's the same school as his son visiting. The lives both students are connecting together. The son must teach the math and physics his own father. The father getting to know, that the life of the students is not simple as he supposed.

Sixty-year-old Joska Platejz, a peculiar jack of all trades, lives in a cottage in the Giant Mountains. He cooks wonderfully for a group of woodcutters. He has brought a mountain stream to his cottage and set up a set of tanks (one of which he keeps trout in). He also has a wind turbine, a wood-burning cable car, air-conditioning in the cottage and a mannequin of a man called Albert, who scares away unknown visitors. Joska is a man who claims that it is best to be alone, yet he constantly tries not to be alone. He is friends with a gamekeeper, a teacher, he tries to get his children to visit him regularly and therefore easily succumbs to a middle-aged lady. She doesn't take long to persuade him and soon comes to his cottage. A great love seems to be born...

The hero, rushing from one misfortune to another, is former accountant Řehoř Maršíček, who after a heart attack, out of fear of death, decides to live a calm, moderate life and follow the principles of a healthy lifestyle. Not to smoke, not to drink, to exercise and eat healthily. He takes up the position of an auditor of patients and hopes that he will have peace in his new job. Instead, he experiences one nervous breakdown after another. He gradually makes one good resolution after another. Řehoř falls into unhealthy food, alcohol and women. In addition, he gradually loses most of his life's certainties, including a roof over his head. The result is a second heart attack, after which the hero promises himself again that he will fix everything and live a healthy life.

The main characters are a young psychologist Doubravka and a village youth, Honza Macháček. He is a tractor driver who temporarily lost his driver's license in a crazy bet, so he now herds a cooperative herd of cows, she is at the cottage with her boy Boba, who is not very successful in studying medicine and is currently preparing for his remedial exams. Honza's immediacy, optimism and approach to life and work contrast sharply with the selfish, weak-willed and unbalanced Boba, and Doubravka increasingly realizes that her feelings for Boba have disappeared and that she actually loves Honza. The question is how her somewhat conservative family will view such a game.

Mikolás and his brother Adam end up with a young German hostage of noble blood during a robbery. While their clan prepares for the wrath of the German king, Mikolás is sent to pressure his neighbor Lazar into a defense pact. Persuasion fails and he abducts Lazar's daughter Marketa on the eve of her initiation as a nun in an act of vengeance.

Jealous of her vapidly "good" sister's popularity, poisonous Viktoria doses pretty Klara's tea with a slow-acting fatal substance. As the latter grows hysterically weak, the former finds success increasingly compromised by guilt, blackmail, and the pesky need to kill others lest she be exposed.

The film is a metaphor for the Cold War. It depicts two neighbouring nations: peace loving Fortuna and the not so peaceful land of the Steel City.

A very free adaptation of Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus", Goethe's "Faust" and various other treatments of the old legend of the man who sold his soul to the devil. A nondescript man is lured by a strange map into a sinister puppet theatre, where he finds himself immersed in an indescribably weird version of the play, blending live actors, clay animation and giant puppets.

Joseph K. awakes one morning, to find two strange men in his room, telling him he has been arrested. Joseph is not told what he is charged with, and despite being "arrested," is allowed to remain free and go to work. But despite the strange nature of his arrest, Joseph soon learns that his trial, however odd, is very real, and tries desperately to spare himself from the court's judgement.

A group of outcasts, including a vagabond and a prostitute, gather at the outskirts of the industrial area of a large Czech city, one of the things that helps some of them survive is alcohol.

Dvořák's well-known composition reappears again and again in the serious moments of the lives of the father and son Hupeks - talented non-professional musicians for whom music gives them the opportunity to rise above difficulties and problems...

Michal, a disillusioned teenager, clashes with his authoritarian father and runs away from home. Adrift in the city, he navigates a restless journey of fleeting encounters while rejecting the rigid values of his parents' generation.

A little boy, named Prdelka, traveled with his father from Prague to the country during the Second World War. There, the boy became friends with a local fisherman and learned to catch the golden eels. Eventually, his father and mother were arrested by the Nazis and the boy stayed with the fisherman.

Donizetti's opera as film.

Documentary feature about Czech director Jiří Menzel, featuring Menzel himself as well as Miloš Forman, Emir Kusturica, István Szabó and others.

A look at the life, work and importance of Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman (1910-89), a genius of world cinema, a wizard of special effects, revealing his sources of inspiration and his revolutionary filming techniques.

Based on the only extensive prose work by the surrealist painter Josef Capek, Shades of Fern most resembles the philosophical fairy tales and fables of Josef’s older brother, the legendary Czech novelist and playwright Karel Capek. Two young poachers, more boys than men, kill a gamekeeper when they are caught illegally hunting. Panicked, they retreat into a forest that grows steadily more forbidding and deadly as their fear for the future—and guilt over their action—mounts. Loosely based on hundreds of oral folk tales and legends that haunt the woods of Czechoslovakia, Vlácil’s contemporary updating artistically underscores the relationship between man and nature, crime and punishment, isolation and society, and guilt and memory.

Cast out by his father, young Ondrej joins the Order of the Teutonic Knights, where he is raised by strict monk Armin. After years of hardship, Ondrej escapes from the Order when he is wrongly punished, and sets out for his former home. Arriving to discover his father to be dead, Ondrej now not only assumes control of his father's properties, but seeks to marry his former stepmother.

Two young men, thinking that they've killed someone, flee to Poland.

This downbeat, grim drama about three brothers who are reunited at their mother's funeral is actually visually as dark as its story, making it difficult at times to clearly distinguish a scene. These brothers are not particularly exceptional as people go, but at least they have branched out into separate vocations in their lives. One brother is a doctor, another is a criminal, and the third is a bus driver. Like others in Europe, they suffered through World War II, yet no matter what their backgrounds and experiences, their interpersonal relationships are not exactly gripping drama.

Young Ondra has asthma and so his parents throw away his favourite toy: a musty old stuffed bear named Kooky. That night Ondra dreams that Kooky is determined to find his way back home from the dump. In the boy's fantasy, the bear gets lost in a forest occupied by strange animals and remarkable beings that he never heard of while living on the toy shelf in Ondra's room. And of course even in this small imaginary world, true good exists as does real evil, which Kooky must face up to in order to become a real hero.

A short story film depicting the three different faces of crime. In the short story "The Weekend", Karas kills a woman he raped some time ago in order to silence her. However, he accidentally kills another woman. In "Hostages", a drug addict, Chaban, terrorizes the hospital's operating team, but the disciplined doctors handle the difficult situation. In "The Pickpocket", the thief Benda wants to return to his trade immediately after his release, but his attempt ends tragically.

Life in communist Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s and the punishments for going against the state.

An escort composed of three people transports a huge amount of new one-hundred crown banknotes in a special railway car. At the 196th kilometer, a village girl is waiting at the railway crossing and spots two men removing some packages from the track. The scene is immediately followed by the report of a gun and the unwanted witness is shot dead. Soon afterwards, on the 201st kilometer, the train explodes. Only one of the escorts Lenk (Radoslav Brzobohatý) survives the explosion, taken to hospital with serious injuries. Criminologist Major Kalas (Jirí Sovák) and the very young Second Lieutenant Karlícek (Jaromír Hanzlík) patiently gather facts, leads and testimonies.