Director: Tomáš Bojar

An Unlikely Romance

Luisa and Erika are prototypes of young women who plunge into relationships with the "wrong" men. Luisa wants to become an actress, which upsets her husband Igor to no end. Erika is trying to work as much as possible so that she can afford to study and thereby achieve a better outlook on life, but she unfortunately runs up against a boss who doesn't have the best intentions with her. Ultimately Luisa's husband demonstratively commits suicide. Erika accidentally kills her boss in self-defense... The women blame themselves for all these failures, and that has got to change. Both have to grow up and start living again. Perhaps even together.

Czech RAPublic

First documentary about the Czech hip hop scene shows how close the Czech rap can come to humour and irony. Three protagonists of the film, James Cole, Hugo Toxxx and Orion appear in situations where they are confronted with a professor of linguistics, children of a Romany quarter, a strict birth registry clerk, classical music trio, a statute of national revival hero Josef Jungmann, and the chanson singer Hana Hegerova, with whom they have a chance to sing the national anthem: "mimino mi mele nohu máma mele maso a máma mele sele kde domov můj?"

Homies

Two new flatmates are not even looking for an exit from the lockdown - which becomes more of a backdrop outside the windows of a one-bedroom Prague apartment. Shot on an ever present handheld camera, the reality of the (non)passing time of the pandemic slowly reveals itself. As the protagonists mutually confess and unmask each other over past unfulfilled relationships, we witness how they naturally complement one another in the household. The look inward, at ordinary events, gradually transforms the apartment into an autonomous world of imagination and song. The film thus serves as a manifesto of creation as an escape from an otherwise closed-up world. With giddy exaggeration, the emerging friendship opens up more general questions of the human need for social interaction and sharing life.

Over the Hills

Father and son Vít and Grisha travel to Russia to visit the boy’s mother and sister. Why did their previously harmonious family split in two? A documentary road movie about the distance between two Slavic countries, the difficulties of fatherhood and puberty, and the alienation between people who should, in theory, be the closest of all.

Good Old Czechs

František Fajtl and Filip Jánský were among the few Czechoslovak airmen who actively fought on all major European battlefronts during World War II and lived to tell the tale. This unique documentary edit, which combines authentic eyewitness accounts of historic events with little-known archival footage, examines various fates and places as well as the journeys associated with them. The resulting amalgam of images, speeches, and music/sound files is far from your typical historical illustration. A suggestive portrayal of life under bleak conditions, far away from home and on the cusp of death, unfolds before our very eyes.

Off Sides

When the junior ice hockey team from the small town of Náchod, in the Czech Republic, sets off in a bus to Morocco to play the away game in an exchange programme, the players and their coach expect an easy victory and a cultural shock: “bring ear plugs”, the coach suggests them with a touch of undisguised condescendence, so as not to hear the call to prayer early in the morning. Both on and off the ice, Rozálie Kohoutová and Tomáš Bojar’s camera focuses on a few teenagers and their exchanges, simultaneously funny and cruel, in a clumsy English.

Two Nil

Pavel Abrahám’s football documentary offers 22 different viewpoints of who is watching. At a match between Sparta and Slavia, the filmmakers used 22 cameras to film the spontaneous reactions of various visitors, fans, tourists, VIPs, intellectuals, and security guards over the course of the entire game. This experiment with the Czech Republic’s national sport shows football as a game around which the viewers create a whole range of other, highly diverse games.