music

Singer Eva Pilarová, lyricist Jan Schneider and composer Bohuslav Ondráček search for the right melody, word and tone in the magical space between silence and sound. The intimacy of their creative process is reminiscent of alchemy, where notes, lyrics and recording equipment give birth to a bitterly swinging love song, It Happens.

An amateur female musician accidentally finds a set of drums on a deserted Thai island. The very unlikely situation launches the minimalist story of a film labyrinth, which turns into a journey from rehearsal to public performance. The conceptual film weaves images and sounds, often returning in reframing or recontextualisation, into the equivalent of a rhythmic piece of music. The audio-visual medium conveys intense emotions that defy superficial rational interpretation behind the recurring leitmotif of beating drums. A film unfolds on the screen before your eyes that you literally have to tune in to.

The Plastic People of the Universe was formed in 1968. The trial of the band members in 1976 initiated the creation of Charter 77. During the so-called normalisation period, the band was banned. The musicians started performing together again in 1997. The last concert of The Plastic People of the Universe together with the Brno Philharmonic took place on 20 November 2021 in Broumov. How did the members of the legendary band The Plastic People of the Universe experience the last concert of their career?

A film about the friendship of musician Miroslav Wanek and artist Martin Velíšek, connected by their collaboration and especially the band Už jsme doma. It was directed by Václav Kučera, who died in 2019, and completed years later by Radim Špaček. Similarly, producer Romek Hanzlík died in 2019 and the film was completed by Petr Koza in his company KOZA Film, s.r.o.

A look at 40 years of subversive work by the American collective Negativland. Would you go to jail for your work? They say they never had a hit single, but they had a hit lawsuit. Negativland's media collages, which predated the web-sharing era from the late 1970s onwards, resulted in a single called U2. The group documented the court-imposed punishment in such a way as to create a spectacular artefact, and a narrative about the moral standards around copyright and intellectual property. “Media is coming into our homes: its images and sounds flow into our living rooms. So I consider them mine – and I want the right to dispose of them,” says Negativland member Don Joyce.