humor

Men still have a privileged position. Yet the concept of a “crisis of masculinity” is increasingly permeating the media, with a loosening of roles and a growing uncertainty about what it means to be a man today. The director Jan Hušek also asks this question. He was still wetting himself by the age of thirteen, which earned him the unflattering nickname that is the film's title. In his open video diary, he captures the physical and spiritual transformation of his journey from boy to man. He returns to the woods and the roots of his childhood trauma. In doing so, he turns the camera on himself as well as on various teachers or his father. Perhaps the mark of adulthood, after all, is not overwrought masculinity, but the acceptance of his inner “pisspants”.“I ran away from home at night, and while walking through the woods I realized that becoming a man was up to me alone.”

Literally with the arrival of the first steam train, “excursionists” began to appear in the Poberouní region – weekend guests who built cottages here for recreation and began to pile new deposits onto the geological layers, this time in the form of memories captured by recording devices. The audiovisual dimension of one region's memory is the subject of this experimental documentary, assembled from found footage taken by its residents over the course of nearly a century. It is based on the memoirs of Gizela Šmidlíková, published in newspapers in the 1990s, and on various visual and ideological associations developed against a hypnotic musical backdrop. “Using a contemplative, observational 'non-documentary' approach, I processed the memory of a place, the depiction of local cultural life and the great importance of the railway to all of the Lower Poberouní region.”Source: Magdaléna Kašparová

Shoot the elephant and the problem is solved, says the invisible Prague City Council, which decides on financing culture. A bitterly satirical commentary on the disastrous state of the buildings of the National Gallery, Czech Television and Prague's monuments points out that we are all elephants with the roof of the menagerie falling in on our heads.

Being somewhere else is the essence of Czech camping. Fleeting glances, the charms of passing women, queues for food, skirmishes between human males, the territoriality of tent stakes and the erotica of swing music personify the subversive summer illusion of a touchingly petty and collective escape into sameness.

A report from an unfinished housing estate, which won an award at the Venice Film Festival, captures the sea of mud separating the inhabitants of Prague's Malešice from their dreams of a new world, one which they are given in an absurdly unfinished state. Concrete panels like biscuits stacked on top of one another, a tap with no water and a can of mud for lunch remind us that society is a playground where anything can happen.

A run-down Swedish small town. A hot summer evening. A group of young people meet in the parking lot of a local supermarket. The location doesn't offer much in the way of leisure activities. That’s why they’ve found their own hobby: cars. In their specially modified vehicles, they listen to music, date, race, try to outwit the police… Their cars are a source of pride and their main topic of conversation. An anthropological study of the car subculture slowly turns into a magical-realistic probe into the depths of the night, where hormones and phantom creatures awaken to the sound of revving engines. “When everyone else drives illegally, you can't keep up. If you are going to the city, and everyone drives 90, if you drive 30 you'll arrive an hour later.”

Jiří Menzel, a bachelor, is looking for a partner in an instructional film about how not to be alone. This socially futuristic probe into the souls of singles with a lack of dating opportunities shows that new times offer new possibilities – like a Swiss computer for finding the partner of your dreams.

Wenceslas Square is the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in a nutshell, explains Karel Höger in his annotated mosaic of local phenomena, which includes “meetings by the horse”, teeming crowds of tourists from Czechoslovakia and abroad, shopping frenzy, and patriotic affection for Czech beer and glass.