The Following (2023)

Karel Vachek’s graduate film offers us a documentary essay which is both a light-hearted and aggressive little piece and also a parody of investigative film journalism. The Strážnice folk festival, backed by the cultural Party apparatus of the time, for years had little to commend itself to authentic folklore. In the film the event assumes the form of a bizarre stage spectacle with almost surrealistic elements that Vachek reinforces with unconventional approaches (commentary appearing as titles on screen, singing, declamations into the camera, feature etudes, the fusion of news coverage and fiction). The result is a stirring film collage depicting various characters, from crowd-pleasers, Easter egg decorators, kitsch artists and peddlers, to museologists and local residents, all of whom come up against the eccentric "identical” twin reporters Karel and Jan Saudek and a bored actress who appears as an extra. Using their special blend of irony and wit, they present us with the sad truth.

A boy writes a comic book with his best friend, and finds situations depicted in the comic book coming to life. Along with the appearance of a mysterious girl, the boy is forced to face the reality of what he has written, and begins a battle to attempt to rewrite death.

On a sunny afternoon an old man speaks to a laundress about his love for Provence, then a black flag is unfurled outside the town monument: news has arrived over the radio that the famous composer Foerster, born in the town, has just died.

The young Marta has made a break in her medical education to fully invest in her career as a model. We follow her for a day in her life, almost completely without hearing her voice. It is seldom that Marta gets the space to speak, instead she is mostly subject to the voice of others.

Surreal film of non-sequiturs, swimming, death and the holocaust.

What is the value of energy invested into friendship? How can you defend yourself when there is no one to stick up for you? Our heroines find a way out of a complicated situation by continuing poetic life and by avoiding objective reasoning, proofs of innocence, condemnation and the need to win.

A tram pasted with posters travels through Prague. The mounted loudspeakers invite passers-by to a series of concerts of Giuseppe Verdi's masterpieces. On the tram a party of young people is getting drunk.

In this six-minute short, a man’s attempt to burgle a home is interrupted by a child.

In a series of juxtaposed images and sounds, Jaromil Jireš comments on the tragic premature death of thousands as well as their posterity due to the atomic bomb.

Fati Farari, a black man from Africa, is completing his studies in classical piano at the Music Academy of Prague. It's the day before his first solo concert, where he is going to play Bach. While he strolls around the city he is thinking, not so much about the concert as about himself, both as a lonely foreigner and as a human being in cosmos. Here and there he encounters some racist comments, but mostly he just feels the weight of social exclusion because of his otherness, especially when it comes to women. On the morning of the day for his concert the embassy informs him that his whole family has perished. He feels totally broken, although he thinks that everyone holds some pain inside. His piano teacher, a professor at the Academy, looks him up, and tells him that he heard what has happened. The professor advises him to communicate his feelings that evening by using his Bach.

A young man in Oakland, California, wakes with a heavy heart and decides to take a walk through the neighborhood to the local barbershop.

The initiation of a young Jewish child into Guernica's world.

Two Spanish student and a bunch of French students aim to waste as much class time as possible

Sofia's brains went missing, when mixing toasting with ironing.

Joy can't let go of her ex, but doesn't seem to be able to fall for the new guy. In the meantime she keeps having casual sex with strangers.

A group of college students go for a weekend trip to shoot a short horror film for class... when the terror gets real.

A run-of-the-mill family is terrorized by strangers dressed in military garb who invade their private realm.

An office worker gets terrorized by an unknown force through an error on his computer.

A run-of-the-mill family is terrorized by strangers dressed in military garb who invade their private realm.