Jan Čuřík

Little kids, little worries, big kids, big worries, sighs many a parent often. This is no different for the mother of eighteen-year-old Frantisek, who has just graduated from high school without much glory and is about to start his first job. Fandy is still full of boyish dreams, yearns for a career as a rowing representative, competes with a friend for the favor of an admiring girl and is generally stubbornly opposed to taking life seriously.

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A story about young girl Hanka who doesn't have parents and is forced to spend most of her time in a hospital bed.

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A story about an everyday life of an inflectional department of Prague hospital.

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In the final days of the Second World War in 1945 Frantisek Pribyl is killed during a shoot-out with the Germans. After the funeral, the widow (Jana Svandová) and her two young sons Martin and Ondra move to her deceased husband's native village at the foot of the Kralický Snezník mountains. Life in the borderlands is far from easy for the lonely woman. The village is almost deserted, food supplies are delayed; the Werwolf (Nazi guerrilla squads) are hiding in the mountains, and shooting is heard from time to time. The elder son Ondra (Michal Dlouhý) is helping out his mother and at the same time absorbing intense new experiences. He meets an old Czech resident Skurek (Lubomír Kostelka), German women working in the forest, soldiers from the engineering units removing the mines, and a young first lieutenant. At night he dreams about his dead father whom he loved very much. This is why he runs away from home when he finds out that the lieutenant is courting his mother.

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This wacky musical comedy builds on absurd ideas, parodic humour and many variously subverted references to famous...

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Set in Prague during the years leading up to World War II, this family saga tells the story of a cobbler named Vincenc Bursik (Vladimir Mensik), who uproots his clan from the country to the city, only to suffer the loss of his wife and the failure of his shoe business within months. When his daughter moves away to go live with a wealthy businessman as his mistress, Vincenc is left to take care of his two sons, who spend their days in a secret garden vying for the affections of a teenage girl.

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A telephone mechanic secretly pursues his passion for hunting, deceiving his wife and enlisting friends to cover for him. After a successful hunt, he mistakenly climbs onto the wrong balcony and is apprehended by police, but his disguise prevents identification, leading everyone, including his wife and friends, to deny it’s him.

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It’s a hot holiday season in the city and Alena is pretty much left to her own little self, fantasizing and running her personal daily rituals, keeping most people at a safe distance, yet trying to get male attention.

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A romantic story about Jakub, a student in the summer camp, and his teacher Klara.

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A model Communist village is visited by a flying saucer.

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The late summer of 1918. Paul, Willi and Heinrich from an age-old German town are good friends, although there is a great deal that divides them. Heinrich comes from an officer's family with an army tradition and is preparing to enter cadet college. Paul's father and grandfather are workers, and Willi, left to depend on himself, works as a hotel messenger. The last year of the war is hard for everyone, but while Paul and Willi know their own minds and do not hesitate to help the war fugitives Tony and Sepp, for Heinrich everything is more complicated.

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An historical depiction of the events preceding the political murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, would-be emperor of the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914.

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A harsh and raw story about the difficult life of a village woman and the sad fate of her three daughters...

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This story from the time of the occupation tells how the students of the teachers' institute decided to hold a traditional ball despite the ban. However, they had to cope with conditions more than threatening: the presence of Nazi thugs who intend to execute captured partisans as a warning...

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Three short stories. Prague finally sees the approval of the subway construction. Thousands of individuals took part in preparing, course and finalizing construction of subway and their lives crossed at certain points of this construction.

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It is the summer of 1945. A party of young people are enjoying the beginning of a new life to the full. For them this is the year one. One of them, law student Pavel, is more attracted to film than to law. With his eight-millimeter camera, he films everything that catches his attention. One day he captures an interesting face on film, a girl with an air of mystery. Pavel visits the girl, whose name is Helena, and meets hers and her elder energetic sister Olga. From Olga, he learns that the girls have spent the years of German occupation in a concentration camp and cannot forget the horrors they have lived through.

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The short story film follows the fate of three young men who will soon have to decide what to do with their lives. The first "Poet", an aspiring author, publishes his first poem, while the sporting career of the second "Rep", a national table tennis player, is disrupted by a maths repartee. The last "Beaver Grizzly" is a tramp more used to solitude, yet he starts a pioneer troop...

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The story of Goldilocks, Sleeping Beauty, Krejcik in an enchanted castle and the skirmishes of the animals with the robbers of Petrov.

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This film, chronicling the last days of Czech resistance fighter Maruska Kuderikova (played by Magda Vasaryova), is based on her diaries. Though she was tortured and eventually executed by the Nazis, her diaries indicate that she was optimistic for the humanity of her captors and did not by any means hate them. Told with simple dignity, this film makes clear why Maruska became a national hero.

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Valerie, a Czechoslovakian teenager living with her grandmother, is blossoming into womanhood, but that transformation proves secondary to the effects she experiences when she puts on a pair of magic earrings. Now seeing the world around her in a different light, Valerie must endure her sexual awakening while attempting to discern reality from fantasy as she encounters lecherous priest Gracian, a vampire-like stranger and otherworldly carnival folk.

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At the centre of the story is Miss Lenka Stříbrná. An attractive, but a little strange young woman. The gym teacher Vasek is shy and very clumsy with women. So he asks his friend, the editor Karel, for help. The experienced seducer willingly seizes the opportunity and tries to win Lenka for himself, but all his efforts fail due to her stubbornness. Gradually, this comedy-tinged love etude gives way to drama. It culminates at an editorial party at the Slap Dam, where all the characters in the story meet unexpectedly and editor Leden finally understands what Miss Silver's flirtation was all about.

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In the 1950s, Ludvik Jahn was expelled from the Communist Party and the University by his fellow students, because of a politically incorrect note he sent to his girlfriend. Fifteen years later, he tries to get his revenge by seducing Helena, the wife of one of his accusers.

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The fate of the insignificant poet Leonard Undene is transposed into the media atmosphere of the late 1960s. An ironic image of the times, a black comedy about the ease of manipulating the crowd, about the deceitfulness of slogans, about the phenomenon called public opinion, about the power of media fame...

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A holiday story about first tentative love, set in a romantic cottage village on the banks of a river. There, a 15-year-old girl feels lonely and confused, bitterly reliving her hopes and disappointments...

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Five Girls Around the Neck, in 1967, set out to explore that critical age of adolescence when a person's character is formed for good or evil. Schorm examined a girl's problems of being giving too much. She tries to buy the goodwill of her less fortunate friends; her intentions are pure, but in the difficulty of communicating she learns envy and deceit, and must decide if she will submit to double dealing or steel her life against self-deception and mediocrity. In addition to the relationship between the girl and her friends, Schorm introduces a teenage romance and the broader relationship between the girl's parents - neatly tied together with segments of Weber's opera "Der Freischütz". He reveals himself as a skilled psychological director with a wide range of knowledge about people.

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Bernhard works as a warehouse clerk in Munich. After being sentenced to probation for a physical altercation with a right-wing extremist, he could no longer continue his engineering studies. Bernhard meets Johanna. She comes from a well-to-do family; her father is a real-estate developer and her brother is in the diplomatic service. Bernhard wants to share his roots with her, so the two go to Prague, where he lived until the end of the war. But her father disapproves of the trip to the Eastern bloc. When Bernhard finds out that he owes his chance to develop new technology, which led to his career advancement, to his girlfriend’s father, he is upset …

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Michal's father and his friends are stigmatized by their war experience and the post-war social deformations in which they took part either directly, or watched them cowardly and in silence. They are trying to repress their feelings of guilt and justify their behavior to the young generation with memories of their heroic war feats. Michal, however, does not want to have anything to do with their problems. He subconsciously perceives the unpleasant atmosphere in the family as well as his father's hypocrisy. After one of many quarrels with his father, he runs away from home, determined to go his own way.

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A passionate communist worker is discouraged by the changing political climate and the failure of his peers to live up to his ideals.

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The story is about Harold, an isolated figure in an overwhelming world of totalitarian bureaucracy. Harold tries to find the elusive Joseph Kilian, an old acquaintance, in Prague. When Harold stumbles across a state-run cat-lending store, he impulsively rents a feline for the day. Later, he attempts to return the cat and finds that the store no longer exists. Now with a furry companion, Harold continues his search for Kilian. Written and directed by Pavel Juracek, this 40 minute film effectively aims its allegorical shots at personality cults and the absurdities of a totalitarian regime.

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