Known for Acting
A WW I veteran still haunted by his time in the trenches settles in a small town to work for the railroad company. His pretty wife attracts the attention of the lonely young gravedigger.
Told from the perspective of man reflecting on his childhood in Prague in the early years of World War II and the eventual destruction of his family as the Nazis rise to power. The storyline focuses heavily on Jewish-Czech Silberstein family members. Drama was filmed on the real events as a tribute to Mr. Nicholas Winton, the British humanitarian who organized the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War in an operation later known as the Czech Kindertransport from German-occupied Czechoslovakia and likely death in the Holocaust.
It is certainly no coincidence that Lady Chatterley's Lover was written after World War I, in 1928. What else but the incredible, hitherto unimaginable ravages of war could once again raise fundamental questions about human existence? Who are we, what are our true values and goals, what are our hopes? Lawrence answers with a love story of a socially unequal couple, harsh, wild, unabashed. He provokes with a passionate clash of liberating feelings and surviving conventions, with free expression contained in the text itself, its style and vocabulary.
ComiBaran, a protestant blacksmith arrives in the little village of Lakotice to kill Sekal, a cruel Nazi collaborator.
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)
While visiting Russia on his father’s lecture tour, Indy runs off on his own and meets Leo Tolstoy. Later, on a trip to Athens, Indy and his father are forced together by circumstance when they get into a bind in the monasteries of Meteora, where they share some memorable moments.
Who is this confident man who, with unusual elegance and surprising professionalism, began working at the reception desks of the highest government and party leaders one day? Where did he come from, what are his tasks, and who entrusted him with them? These questions will be pondered in the film by members of the secret services, important and insignificant minions of the powerful, who are convinced that they know every link in the ingeniously opaque chain of relationships and competences of a centrally controlled state. Before the surprising revelation of the mysterious master of ceremonies living a double life, he manages to pull off one last stunt: a monstrous hoax whose consequences can only be tragic.
Vladimír Michálek chose an unconventional adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel for his feature debut. Artistically reminiscent of the classic films of Karel Zeman, the director reinterpreted this dark story of a man vainly seeking a place in a rigidly ordered society by changing the desperate conclusion into a happy end. The film provided Czech comedian Jirí Lábus with a new kind of role: that of the despotic uncle of a main hero Karel Rossman (Martin Dejdar).
The heroes of this wacky spectacle are the large Karafiát family, who, in the emerging market conditions, decide to abandon their current way of making a living (stealing funeral wreaths and transforming them into artfully tied bouquets) and start a business. This is how the peculiar travel agency Český ráj, built on the ingenious idea of not taking poor Czech tourists abroad, but on the contrary, rich foreigners to Bohemia, sees the light of day. Thanks to a quirky advertising campaign, a motley mix of French people actually manage to board a bus in Paris and set off. But the Karafiats' entrepreneurial worries are just beginning.
In May 1945, a broken violinist lies drunk by a creek, haunted by memories of his life before and during WWII. Once the celebrated first violin in spa orchestras, he married Jewish nurse Róza and dreamed of fatherhood, only to face brutal anti-Jewish persecution. Relegated to second violin, he spirals into alcoholism and betrayal, while Róza and their daughter are deported. Cast out by colleagues and lovers, he descends into madness, murdering a vagrant with his violin case. In a final psychotic haze, he tends a roadside Christ statue before collapsing, his shattered life a testament to love, loss, and atrocity.
Life in communist Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s and the punishments for going against the state.
At the beginning was the Slovak television series Lekár umierajúceho czasu (Doctor of Dying Time), dedicated to the Rudolphine-era scientist Jan Jesenius. He ended up on the scaffold along with other gentlemen after losing the anti-Habsburg uprising. When director Miloslav Luther conceived the idea of making an abridged version of the footage for cinema, he had to not only rebuild the storyline but also dub it into Czech. However, the result was only an illustrative puzzle, describing the various stages of the hero's turbulent life.
