Czechoslovakia, 1941. As the war continues, Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich arrives in Nazi-occupied Prague and establishes a regime of terror that will force freedom fighters to act. But the price to pay will be too high.
Adolescence is always a difficult time; it is doubly so for Gábina. For one thing, she is growing up in the normalization years of the 1970s, and then she also has to face the reality that her father is a well-known actor disavowed by the regime. Although he abandoned the family years before, his existence casts an ominous shadow over the lives of not only Gábina, but also her older sister and mother, who are trying to find a civilized way through the social mire of the times.
A man leaves his busy city life for the peace of the country home where he spent his early childhood. His new life is soon disturbed by strange events.
The film tells the exciting life of the great Czech composer Leos Janácek (1854-1928), also known by the thick silver hair that crowned his head and his strong character, which could overcome the adversities of fate.
This movie is based on texts of Bohumil Hrabal, world-known Czech prosaic. It's a story (in a form of a mosaic of short episodes and pictures) about the sadness and happiness of inhabitants of Kersko (Kersko is a small woody area full of cottages and roods). These people are both simple and sensitive, they have their own pleasures (e.g. Leli is a collector of cheap, but inutile things) and the greatest delight of all of them is a hunting. Crude poetics of amateur hunting is screened by dreamy pictures of this area. Menzel mixes sentimental lyricism and rough (but not vulgar!) humor and the outcome is the never-ending landscape of continuous life in the proximate nearness of nature. The performances of actors are brilliant. Both Rudolf Hrusinsky as a Franz and Jaromír Hanzlik as a Leli have nonrecurring charm bottomed on a pain and inebriation. Only the music is not perfect: Jiri Sust usually assembled his film music from his older works and in this movie there is many quotations.
The opera lady singer Ema Destinnová is in all her splendor at the American stages. But in Europe there rages war and she decides to return home to Bohemia.
The town is waking up. The bus driver Josef Král is saying goodbye to his wife Vera who is in a state of advanced pregnancy. At the rolling mill, the master craftsman Mares is preparing for retirement, which is now only two days away. Elderly Simon who grows and sells vegetables at the market has problems with his wife. Their little home has to give way to a new development but the wife Simonka refuses to move out. The chairman of the workers' council has troubles with the miner Adam, who has started drinking. He doesn't know that Adam is getting divorced and fears he may lose his young son to his wife.
