Jiří Pavlík

In post-WWII Communist Czechoslovakia, several characters considered bourgeois are sentenced to work in a junkyard for rehabilitation. Among them is a young man who pines for a female convict.

Honza and Zuzana are very young husband and wife. They have a little daughter of whom willingly occasionally take care the grandparents and Honza's fifteen-year-old brother Martin. Zuzana continues studying and Honza devotes all weekends as an amateur competitor to the motor-cycles at the speedway. Zuzana is not interested in motor-cycles. Martin holds responsible for his brother's marriage and at the advice of his friend Magda, who is of the same age, invites her sister-in-law to the club of Hucul horses so that she does not feel bored. But by misfortunes and unexplained quarrels both young husband and wife start being jealous of one another.

After returning home from the army, Vasek (Ladislav Potmesil) has married Bozka (Eva Trejtnarová) and the couple now live at her parents' house. Vasek is unhappy both with his work and with sharing the house with Bozka's parents. He and his friend Ruda (Oldrich Vlach) decide to take a temporary job in Ostrava for a year. Bozka is against this, but Vasek gets his way. Mining is hard work but Vasek gradually adapts to it. He gets homesick from time to time and wants to go back, but his pride always wins out. Once he really does travel back to see Bozka, but he doesn't find her at home.

Zofie and Dominika, two girls of very different temperaments, become friends during hop-picking volunteer work in the summer. Zofie (Jaroslava Schallerová) is serious to the point of reticence and she is delighted with her friendship with Dominika. For the self-assured and superficial Dominika (Irena Svárová) the whole thing is just a momentary whim. When she leaves the work camp before everybody else, she doesn't even say goodbye to Zofie. The two girls meet again after the holidays as first-year students at medical school, and become close again during the nursing techniques class.

Sherlock Holmes likes to play violin and expects a great career in music. He gets a place in a spa orchestra, but he is again and again distracted by criminal cases. Therefore he is the only one who does not see that his violin has no future. He solves the criminal mysteries in passing but the final test shows that the famous detective is tone-deaf.

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.

Diane is married to an architect in this situation comedy. The two met in Czechoslovakia before marrying and moving to France. He becomes extremely jealous when he suspects her of having a lesbian affair with a ballet dancer. His incessant questions and insane jealousy make Diane resentful to the point she considers pushing him off a cliff.

A black comedy set in a Prague cabaret.

Middle-aged Antonin and his friends, the major, now retired, and the canon, are in the river, swimming and philosophizing. Then it starts to rain. It just seems to be that sort of summer. Antonin runs the swimming bath with his portly wife Katherine... A man appears with his horse-drawn caravan. He lays a striped pole across the river and walks over. With a handstand and a magic trick, Ernie the Conjuror invites everyone to that evening's performance... Ernie is a tightrope walker of only modest skill, but with a slim and beautiful assistant, Anna. Antonin speaks to her. The two spend the night in the change room by the river, Antonin massaging her feet all night long. Katherine decides to move into the caravan with Ernie. But now the major and even the canon sense Anna's attractiveness...

The kids were smoking secretly in a barn, set fire and fled. Feeling that the investigation closely, "sits on his tail" and soon will be declared to her parents, the protagonist escapes from home. The charred ruins of the barn, he meets a young man who is also why some carefully avoids meeting people, and tied him. According to the book Hoffmann Ota (Ota Hofman).

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

At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Oblivious to the war and the resistance that surrounds him, this young man embarks on a journey of sexual awakening and self-discovery, encountering a universe of frustration, eroticism, and adventure within his sleepy backwater depot.

Jurácek's feature debut is shot in two parts. In the first, a corporal accompanies a new recruit with a sore Achilles tendon for his physical, and all the girls or young women they see are played by the same actress (Ruzickova). In the longer second segment, shot with the help of the Czechoslovakia army, the soldiers pass the time during basic training and maneuvers by talking about girls.

It is the 1930s. Physician Bartos devotedly attends poor patients in the city suburbs, at the same time researching the possibilities of regeneration of human tissues after transplantation. His former colleague Rosen, now working as an assistant at the private clinic of surgeon Kirchenbruch, considers the research a mere utopia. The disappointed Bartos, trying to verify his theories, therefore accepts the outrageous proposal of Marion, owner of a brothel - to surgically replace the face of her lover, the wanted thief Cutter, with the face of murdered Father Hopsasa. Bartos is well paid but his successful operation remains a secret.

A modern fairy tale that takes place in the present.

During the Nazi occupation of a Czech city civilians are being rounded up on the slightest of pretexts and shot. One day three high school boys who crack jokes about a recently deceased "hero of the Reich" are pulled out of school by the Gestapo.

In southern Moravia, in the native village of Velka Samota, a ministry official returns from Prague to lift the declining JZD he helped establish.

On the state stud-farm, Tomás (Rudolf Jelínek) is preparing to become a jockey together with other boys. He loves to read cowboy stories and Western pulp magazines and his passion makes him...

A fictionalized account of Czech soldiers who fought for the French Foreign Legion in Vietnam.

A new teacher with high standards and a strong sense of duty replaces an easy grader. Once bad grades begin to pile up, a product of his predecessor's subservience to the system, the new teacher has to stand up for himself and his students.

Orphan Jirka lives alone with his grandfather by the river. He spends all his free time by the water and does not grow up with the other children. His biggest dream is to catch a big pike, which he knows that he can't do without friends. ► International Film Festival of Documentary and Experimental Films Montevideo - 1956 - 1st Main Prize (Distributor's Official Text)