Echoes 2024
A Ukrainian refugee struggles to navigate an unfamiliar world after she receives devastating news from home.
A Ukrainian refugee struggles to navigate an unfamiliar world after she receives devastating news from home.
Olga is a complex young woman desperate to break free from her unfeeling family and social conventions. With her Louise Brooks-like tomboyish looks she drags herself, chain-smoking, from one job to another until she appears to find her niche as a truck driver. Although she has female lovers she does not form a bond with any of them; instead she clashes, time and again, venting herself in wordless emotional outbursts and other behavioural extremes.
A mentally handicapped young man decides to leave the security of his family in order to search for the purpose of his existence; whether it is freedom, sexual experience, or death.
The bond between a father and a daughter is imperilled by matters that go unspoken and hurts that are slow to heal.
On New Year's Day, two boys wind up in the apartment of Katerina, a teacher from their school, along with her friends, Stepan and David. As the older trio bickers, drinks and flirts, the boys gain eye-opening insight into the adult world.
Another dreary day in a small town. Viki, Sára, and Kiki, three inseparable friends since childhood, are planning to spend their free afternoon the same way they always do: vodka, cigarettes, talking about everything and nothing. But their group dynamic is different today, more explosive: one of them has reached the second round in a casting call for a modeling job, thus raising her chances of leaving this place of dashed hopes and dreams. Her friends might be willing to support her, if only their anger, sadness, and envy weren’t so powerful… A relentless but non-judgmental look at growing up without any prospects of a brighter future.
Two students from the Czech Film Academy commission a leading advertising agency to organize a huge campaign for the opening of a new supermarket named Czech Dream. The supermarket however does not exist and is not meant to. The advertising campaign includes radio and television ads, posters, flyers with photos of fake Czech Dream products, a promotional song, an internet site, and ads in newspapers and magazines. Will people believe in it and show up for the grand opening?
Lena is a 17-year-old girl from a middle-class family who is experiencing her first love: secret night adventures and magical morning walks along the Danube. However, her dream world is shattered when she is raped. Withdrawing, she ultimately attempts to slit her wrists. Her family, helpless, entrusts her to a psychiatric institute.
Futnet - a game similar to volleyball, played with one's feet, and on a tennis court - originated in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s. Now played internationally, village tournaments are still considered a point of pride.
Jakub Strach aka NobodyListen is a successful Czech DJ and music producer. A portrait of his life and work can be seen as a manifesto of the millennial club-going generation. After hundreds of shows and preparations for the upcoming, renowned Addict party, the DJ must deal with the consequences of inflicting a wound scarring his image. Footage from the club backstage mingles with scenes of everyday life in which NobodyListen ponders the dark sides of the club scene, like drugs and misogyny. During the shooting, the Covid pandemic strikes, revealing the insecurities of work in culture.
A meditative film explores the effects that examining consciousness and a microscopic view of one’s inner self have on the rationalism that scientists are expected to have. Even though each has a different approach, a physicist and an economist have similar, indescribable experiences, which they can only show through ‘reflections’. Efforts to change a flat map into an actual landscape lead to an unaffected re-examination of the foundations of our society, in which the myth of objectivity often covers up the manipulation of the powers-that-be, and the desire for deeper knowledge may be the driving force for the military industrial complex just as much as for getting a degree.
A massive segment of the Sun has broken off and is heading for Earth, whose surface is slowly heating up to an unbearable level. A strange mood pervades a debilitated world: anything could happen, virtually anywhere, without warning. Even in a sleepy town, where an 18-year-old lad gets stranded on his way to the family cottage. The fact is that no-one knows at what temperature the human character starts to melt...
Yallah! Underground follows some of today’s most influential and progressive artists in Arab underground culture from 2009 to 2013 and documents their work, dreams and fears in a time of great change for Arab societies. In a region full of tension, young Arab artists in the Middle East have struggled for years to express themselves freely and to promote more liberal attitudes within their societies. During the Arab Spring, like many others of this new generation, local artists had high hopes for the future and took part in the protests. However, after years of turmoil and instability, young Arabs now have to challenge both old and new problems, being torn between feelings of disillusion and a vague hope for a better future.
Short comedy about psychiatrist and a couple with sexual problems.
Story of a group of Boy Scouts and their first encounter with the erotic, laughable, disturbing, and yet oddly beautiful world of adulthood. Faced with secrets and pretense, their friendship goes through trial by fire.
Electra rethinks her 10th birthday, mixing memories with dreams and hidden fantasies. Is our memory just fiction? Or a myth?
A story about a girl, a foreign worker employed at a printing house. A boy and several men long for the girl, but they do not meet even the girl’s low demands. Her current boyfriend (and superior) is cheating on her, her new admirer at work is currently homeless, and the third man is probably a liar.
A nuclear power plant worker obsessed with counting has set a maximum limit on how much electricity he wants to consume until the end of his life. In this grim but masterful 35mm film-poem with strong mathematical undercurrents, Marie-Magdalena Kochová presents to us a story of a man whose life is moving towards transformation. A loving acceptance of the fact that we are not just our bodies, but energy too.