Stanislav Adam

What if you got the chance to build a new society from scratch, what would it look like? Located more than 200 km above the polar circle, the Swedish mining town Kiruna is built on the world's largest and most modern iron ore mining tunnel, which created a significant income for the Swedish government. However, due to the mining the city has started to collapse and in order to save the industry, the city council together with the mining company LKAB have decided to move the town and its citizens 3 kilometres to the east. In doing so, the town has turned a potential disaster into a great opportunity. The new Kiruna will be an even more progressive, even better society for the future. But is it even possible to plan an ideal world?

Liesel Landauer and her friend Hana are linked by a lifelong relationship and an exceptional house built by the architect Von Abt for Liesel and her husband Viktor in Czechoslovakia in the early 1930s.

This episode from the Czech Journal series examines how a military spirit is slowly returning to our society. Attempts to renew military training or compulsory military service and in general to prepare the nation for the next big war go hand in hand with society’s fear of the Russians, the Muslims, or whatever other “enemies”. This observational flight over the machine gun nest of Czech militarism becomes a grotesque, unsettling military parade. It can be considered not only to be a message about how easily people allow themselves to be manipulated into a state of paranoia by the media, but also a warning against the possibility that extremism will become a part of the regular school curriculum.

When the world was on fire, they called Hans Blix. This is how the Swedish diplomat is introduced in ‘Blix Not Bombs’. And if there is one fire he is particularly associated with, it is the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Prior to the invasion, Blix led the delegation of UN officials to find out whether weapons of mass destruction were present in Iraq. And it is the invasion and its consequences that we get Blix’s formidably insightful analysis of in a thorough and honest conversation with director Greta Stocklassa. Few others understand the complexities of international politics on the world stage like Blix, and none can explain it with his intellectual elegance. But Stocklassa’s film is also a portrait of the man himself, now an elderly gentleman, writing his memoirs, walking with a cane and watching birds through the window of his apartment. His outlook and commitment is as urgent as ever, as Blix takes stock of the invasion of Iraq and the state of the world today.