Martin Matiášek

Underneath Times Square, there's a strip club filled with beautiful women. Behind the club's bathroom door is Shoes, a bathroom attendant. For three years, Shoes gives advice, compliments or a sympathetic ear to his visitors, getting occasional tips. But on the night of his three-year anniversary at the club, Shoes' customers and coworkers start to make him look into his own life.

1940, Segunda Guerra Mundial. Checoslovaquia ha sido ocupada por los alemanes. Eliska, una estudiante de medicina, no puede completar sus estudios porque han cerrado las universidades, y trabaja como enfermera en un hospital de la ciudad. La joven también está involucrada en el movimiento de la resistencia contra los nazis, al igual que su novio, el cirujano Richard. Una noche, un hombre de las montañas es traído al hospital con serias heridas, necesitando desesperadamente una transfusión. Eliska es la única con su mismo tipo de sangre... una sangre que le salva la vida y forjará una extraordinaria relación entre la moderna, cosmopolita y educada Eliska y el rudo y bárbaro Joza, un hombre del campo con alma de niño....

This documentary about the people of Blšany is seen through the eyes of Mr. Tříska, the local one-room school principal and an amateur filmmaker, creator of a movie about “the smallest community in the world with a first league soccer team.” He guides us through an eerie village marked by Communism, a hamlet awakened from its lethargy once every two weeks by a first league soccer match. “Meetings were also held in the country,” claims Tříska, “but executions and trials took place in town. A person had to be careful in the country if he didn’t want to be denounced, but when he went to the doctor he knew he wouldn’t pay for prescriptions; and the bus cost a crown fifty, not ten like today.”