Elsner
Based on the only extensive prose work by the surrealist painter Josef Capek, Shades of Fern most resembles the philosophical fairy tales and fables of Josef’s older brother, the legendary Czech novelist and playwright Karel Capek. Two young poachers, more boys than men, kill a gamekeeper when they are caught illegally hunting. Panicked, they retreat into a forest that grows steadily more forbidding and deadly as their fear for the future—and guilt over their action—mounts. Loosely based on hundreds of oral folk tales and legends that haunt the woods of Czechoslovakia, Vlácil’s contemporary updating artistically underscores the relationship between man and nature, crime and punishment, isolation and society, and guilt and memory.
Josef
Josef Lada
Little Vendulka receives a birthday gift of a seemingly innocuous children's book. Little she knows that the book is actually a portal into the surreal world of nursery rhymes and Josef Lada's paintings.
(segment "Losos mého pradědečka")
Comedy, 1974 (Czech Republic) : The movie takes place in England. A group of married middle-aged gentlemen have founded a pretense amateur Egyptology society to maintain some degree of freedom from their wives. The elaborate trick gradually escalates into more and more tangled web of lies and tricks, until they have no option but to disband the society for good.
Sherlock Holmes likes to play violin and expects a great career in music. He gets a place in a spa orchestra, but he is again and again distracted by criminal cases. Therefore he is the only one who does not see that his violin has no future. He solves the criminal mysteries in passing but the final test shows that the famous detective is tone-deaf.
When a noted professor receives a new treatment for his heart ailment, his outlook on life changes. Despite doctor's orders, he is determined to live out his final days on his own terms and fulfill his fantasies. He saves the life of a young woman who tries to kill herself after his recovery from heart surgery in this symbolic story of a man trying to determine his own fate in his last days alive.
