Václav Vodák

Amós is a sailor and owner of a ship. He is impatient with the arrival of his uncle who returns from the Soviet Union, after having exiled there after the Civil War. They have no time to meet because the old man unexpectedly dies. Amos knows, thanks to the letters his mother received, that his uncle had a treasure. However, this one is not among the objects that were in the old man's room.

Martin, a poor student, volunteers to go on a quest to find a cure for the princess Adriana, who is stricken with a strange illness. Unknown to Martin or anyone else, the princess is actually under the spell of the powerful magician Andlobrandini, who is preparing a rejuvenating elixir made from the blood of nine men's hearts.

The sore and tender hearts of a young couple with a toddler are explored in this drama. The little girl, four years old, is not aware that she is doing anything distressing while she ambles about the house on the day after a post-examination celebration by her father, a university student. Even though hung over, he tries hard to be patient with her. The beginning of the story follows her on her little adventures. The girl comes down with a fever, which kills her before anything can be done, and the student and his photographer wife mourn and comfort one another. Little encounters with children cause the mother pain she is seldom free of, until she gives birth to their next child, a son.

Petr Rynes (Svatopluk Matyás) is celebrating his forty-fifth birthday in the company of his friends. He is happy with his wife, and his abilities at work have been rewarded with the medal For Outstanding Work. But a few short seconds are enough to change his life when he makes the ill-judged decision to take his car to bring a friend's wife to the celebration, and hits a pedestrian on the way. He has of course been drinking at the party and is consequently sentenced to sixteen months in prison. Being in jail is not an easy thing for a honorable communist. He soon gets into conflict with several violent inmates, who think they can break his spirit by violence.

Jealous of her vapidly "good" sister's popularity, poisonous Viktoria doses pretty Klara's tea with a slow-acting fatal substance. As the latter grows hysterically weak, the former finds success increasingly compromised by guilt, blackmail, and the pesky need to kill others lest she be exposed.

In 1900, Stepha, the vivacious 30 year old daughter of a wealthy couple, agrees to marry her cousin Paul, who has accumulated large debts as an Austrian army officer. Paul refuses to work or to consummate the marriage, and then his health steadily declines.

The female employees of the poultry-processing factory find relief from their monotonous work in chatting about weddings and marriages. The very young Zdena (Marta Vancurová), too, dreams about a white veil and an entourage of bridesmaids. On her return home from work, she runs into a peculiar man on an abandoned road who pertinaciously offers to read her palm for a few crowns to buy soup. His augury is rather usual - wealth and poverty, suffering and happiness. Then however, he declares that Zdena must marry exactly on 3 November of that year otherwise she will be unhappy.

Mr. Kopfrkingl enjoys his job at a crematorium in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. He likes reading the Tibetan book of the dead and espouses the view that cremation relieves earthly suffering and sets out to save the world. There may be another idealogy that fits snugly with his existing worldview.

A verger, who likes to dress as a priest, is invited, by one of the villagers, to be the pastor at a vacant church. The atheist teacher resents the pastor, and tries to embarrass him in various ways, including being caught with the local girl, Majka.

A baleful limping man walks through Prague. He is Asmodeus (Juraj Herz), the fiend of lustfulness, entertaining himself by putting together by magic couples of lovers. He only fails at the swimming pool. Zuzana (Jana Sulcová), the good-looking blonde, ignores the men whom the devil foists off onto her. She loves Honza (Václav Neckár) and the boy shares her feelings. The fiend is annoyed by the couple and tries to provoke a row. He sends heavy rain to force them into a hotel and then warns Zuzana's father by phone, but the young lovers manage to get out in time. Then the obstinate Asmodeus takes Honza in his sleep to the Institute for Emotional Disorders, where he shows him the ugly sides of love - hysteria, voyeurism, fetishism, suicide attempts...

A murder in a hospital run by incompetents.

This three-part ballad, which often uses music to stand in for dialogue, remains the most perfect embodiment of Nemec’s vision of a film world independent of reality. Mounting a defense of timid, inhibited, clumsy, and unsuccessful individuals, the three protagonists are a complete antithesis of the industrious heroes of socialist aesthetics. Martyrs of Love cemented Nemec’s reputation as the kind of unrestrained nonconformist the Communist establishment considered the most dangerous to their ideology.

A picnic is rudely transformed into a lesson in political hierarchy when a handful of mysterious authority figures show up.