Our Countryside: Bedřichovice Upon Thames

Shock therapy through front-line reporting. Documentary filmmaker Jana Andert spent eight months with an elite unit of the Iraqi army on the front lines of the battle for Mosul, which was occupied by Islamic State fighters from 2014 to June 2017. A fearless report from a city in ruins, robbed of its soul by one of the greatest catastrophes of our times.

Fifty years ago, they lived through the invasion of Czechoslovakia; now they revisit moments captured on film. Věra Křesadlová and her young sons quickly left to be with her husband Miloš Forman in Paris. Petr Semerád witnesses soldiers shooting into crowds of people by the main radio station in Prague. Czech Television’s documentary series on the 50th anniversary of the 1968 invasion was inspired by the popular Israeli series Capturing the Moment, which has been adapted in eight different countries.

Few people in Czech culture have influenced so many generations by their versatile talent during their sixty years of their creative career. A stage actor, musician, lyricist, poet, composer, writer, filmmaker, graphic artist, fine artist, theater director, collector – all these professions were, and still are, those of Jiří Suchý, whose life story was captured by Olga Sommerová.

The work of Pavel Brázda is characterized by perfect craftsmanship, a distinctive sense of the grotesque, and dark humor. Besides being marked by a simplicity of form and diversity of colors, many of his recent works are created as digital prints. This portrait of a distinctive Czech artistic personality looks at his relationship to pop-art, and was shot to mark the artist’s 90th birthday. 

They met on a Friday and got married on the Sunday.  They had to run away from home to flee from their parents' fury, so they went on a honeymoon to the cannibals. There, they lost their illusions, their camera and nearly their lives as well.  Where others would've given up, American filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson risked their lives to narrate an account of a vanishing wilderness. Their story is an authentic imprint of times when filming Africa was more dangerous than all the local predators and malaria. Their work fascinated the public including Ernest Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin and the British Royal Family. However, our era has forgotten them...

We are all aware of the titles The Cassandra Cat, Diamonds of the Night, All My Compatriots or Dinner for Adele. But only few people know, that key aspect of their success lies behind the work of the cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera. The film portrait of one of the most talented filmmakers of 20th century, who had a significant role in the birth of the czechoslovak new wave, that helped rejuvanate world cinematography and get czechoslovakian cinema abroad.

An adventurous travelogue that follows the traces of the largest snake in the world. Naturalist and artist Jan Dungel leads an expedition to find the great anaconda, even if it means venturing into the most remote and uncharted places in the Amazon basin of Colombia or in the Arauca area of the Orinoco basin.

Věra Bílá was once one of the largest celebrities on the Czech music scene. Together with the band Kale, she went on numerous tours of Europe, the USA, and Japan. But after leaving the band in 2006 she no longer performs in public, and her passion for gambling machines caused her to fall into debt. In 2013, her only (adopted) son passed away, followed soon after by her husband. She spent Christmas 2016 all alone in a small room. Nobody gave her any gifts. She remembers her grandmother, who survived Auschwitz, and the many downturns and insults she has had to suffer. And yet she looks forward, with faith in a new project, new energy, hope…

They have spent nearly their entire childhood growing up in institutions. They have no home and no family, no idea where they will leave or how they will earn a living. Lukáš wants to be a famous hip-hopper, Simona is planning to get a sex-change operation, and Jarda would like to have a big family. This longitudinal documentary follows the lives of three young people as they leave the children’s home where they have been living, and try to go it alone.

In 1978, Ieva Lesinska was an ordinary university student who lived with her mother in then-Soviet Latvia. Her father worked officially as a translator for the UN in New York, but was also a KGB agent. When Ieva got permission to visit her father in the United States, he told her that he was about to "flee again" with his second wife. Ieva decided to stay with her father. The new family officially became East German emigrants with new identities: Peter and Linda Dorn with their daughter Evelyn. Today, Ieva is trying to reveal the incredible life and strange death of her father, a KGB agent who defected to the CIA, in a feature documentary.

An intimate insight into the life of a legendary singer during his tour with Fragile. The documentary delves deep into his momentary feelings, strongly affected by bipolar disorder from which he has suffered for many years. The authors also probe his past, looking at the part of his career linked with drugs and volatile relationships with women.

In 1994, Alfréd Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba miraculously escaped from Auschwitz, driven by the conviction that they must inform the world about the horrors being committed at the camp. However, they soon discovered that few people were interested in them, as if nobody wanted to know about the Jewish suffering in the factories of death!