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.

A nurse and her surgeon-lover are part of a resistance movement in 1940s Czechoslovakia. When they are discovered, her lover flees and she must find a place to hide. A patient whose life she saved, a man from a remote mountain village where time stopped 150 years ago, agrees to hide her as his wife.

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.”