From Paris in the 1960s to London in the first decade of the third millennium, Madeleine and her daughter Véra flit from one amorous adventure to the next, living for the moment and taking all the opportunities that life offers. But not every love affair is without its consequences, its upsets and its disappointments. As time goes by and gnaws away at one’s deepest feelings, love becomes a harder game to play.
An explosion sends fear and terror through Berlin. Young Maxi's home is reduced to rubble and ashes, burying her mother and little brothers. Only she and her father survive the terrorist bomb attack. When she happens to meet the charismatic Karl, who tells her about a conference for young people in Prague, she seizes the opportunity to flee Berlin and her grieving father. The political movement behind the meeting claims to be working for a better Europe. Maxi has no idea how close the murderers really are to her family.
A teenage boy, raised by a mother who considers herself psychic, takes a bullied kid into his group of violent misfits. As the group’s troubles escalate toward life-threatening situations, an inner voice awakens in the boy and, with the help of his mother and his new friend, he manages to find his own path.
In the 1980s, Anna, a Czech sprinter, starts training for the Olympics. After she collapses during training, she learns she is being given steroids and decides to stop using them until her mother helps the coaches give them to her.
Over the course of a year, in a small town scarred and beaten down by industrialization, Tonda and Monika, friends since childhood, come to experience what life might be like if they could be with one another – which they seemingly can't. Or can they?
Overwhelmed by a world he can no longer control, a quarrelsome worker in his fifties tries to preserve the integrity of his neighbourhood...
Young geek city boy Martin has to overcome himself and stay two weeks in the summer camp without his comforts and any technology. Here he will be challenged to help the forest creatures to save their forest from being destroyed by greedy developers.
Two neighboring clans and two different approaches to life. What happens when the strained relationship of two domineering fathers interferes with the love of their own children?
Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.
When Herra, a young Czech woman, falls in love with Nazir, an Afghan, she has no idea what kind of life awaits her in post-Taliban Afghanistan, nor of the family she is about to integrate into. A liberal grandfather, an adopted child who is highly intelligent and Freshta, who would do anything to escape her husband's violent grip.
“The fact that I’m playing myself doesn’t mean that it’s me.” Four old schoolmates, today well-known Czech actors (Pavel Liška, Tomáš Matonoha, Josef Polášek and Marek Daniel), decide to make a movie together. Their ambitious colleague Jan Budař takes up directing duties and financing has arrived from Poland. What started out pleasantly enough, however, soon goes awry. Liška’s pronunciation difficulties, Daniel’s alter ego Havlát, and Matonoha’s financial machinations turn the shoot into a fight for survival. More than just a film about friendship and the absurdity of actors’ lives, director Marek Najbrt gives us a witty meditation on reality and illusion, and a unique take on the reality film genre. One of Pavel Liška’s on-set comments (“I didn’t know if I should act as if I were acting, or act as if I weren’t acting, or just not act at all”) illustrates the provocative nature of Najbrt’s subversive, quasi-documentary game.
After her husband's death, Hana lives on alone in the family villa. Her two sons visit her with their families, but these visits frequently end in quarrels. When Hana meets Brona, a hardy fellow, inured to winter swimming, a new world opens before her. Brona's team-mates absorb her into their team and Hana gradually learns to overcome her fear of icy water. Her relation with Brona grows into love.
Michal and Juraj, two students of a theological seminary in totalitarian Czechoslovakia, must decide if they'll choose the easier way of collaboration, or if they'll subject themselves to the surveillance of the secret police.
Anna, a 16 year-old girl from the sticks, trades her military education for life in the big city Running away to Prague opens a whole new world where she drinks her first cappuccino and meets the kind of people she has only seen in movies.
A Czech journalist joins a Prague radio station what broadcasts Nazi propaganda in order to protect his Jewish wife. However, as the Nazi rule over Czechoslovakia calls for more and more collaboration, his relationship with his wife spirals downward.
Documentary maker Jan Holman follows the ultrafamous singer/songwriter Jaromír Novahica during his tour with the band Cechomor. The combination is very succesful, but it draws a heavy toll on the band members and Jan Holman.
The film tells about complete dedication to music, about faith in his own path, which was often different from what everyone recommended. About how great social revolutions and life's upheavals can be overcome with elegance.
Only a few girls practice the art of parkour – running and somersaulting over rooftops, free-climbing up rusted scaffolding and leaping from one wall to the next. Laura takes it all in her stride. Though as she wildly races through the streets of Prague, her thoughts are running wild too. She has a crush on Luky, but he doesn‘t show much interest in her. Laura‘s parents live apart, and her mother is desperately looking for someone new. Jealousy, misunderstandings with her best friend – Laura‘s life is full of confusion. Sometimes, when she can‘t take it anymore, fantasy worlds evolve. When hope and fear push through the cracks of reality, it gets harder to keep her life in balance.
While working abroad, young au pair Mia unwittingly surrenders her reason, her heart and her dreams to a radical family community.
“You bet on someone in the beginning of the process and then you wait and see what life does with them.” This is how Czech director Helena Trestikova explains her long-term documentaries. Following on from the European Film Academy Award winning RENE (2008), Trestikova brings us KATKA – 14 years in the life of a drug addict. KATKA is an extraordinarily raw and uncensored character portrait of a troubled young woman living on the edge of human existence, desperately searching for love and salvation. Will she find it in the rehab? Will she find it in the arms of the man she loves? Or in the first cry of her long-desired baby? Tagging along with her through the back streets and squalors of Prague, Trestikova gets deep under the skin of a person most of us would cross the road to avoid, and shows us Katka’s profoundly human face. You might be angry with Katka, or your heart may go out to her. One thing is certain – you will never forget her.
