Jan Šantroch

Calm in the Canopy

A wealthy middle-aged man at the airport witnesses a tiny incident involving an unknown, perhaps Arab, young man and airport staff. After the young man is confronted directly at the airport toilets, he feels himself subject to an indefinable but increasingly serious sense of danger. The fear of the evil that had, as it were, encircled the man since then, gradually becomes an obsession. The urgent desire to see the evil, to confront it and destroy it.

Takovej barevnej vocas letící komety

A feature-length distribution documentary about Filip Topol, composer, lyricist, pianist, singer and fighter of the group Psí vojáci, whose work has struck three generations.

Tambylles

An eighteen-year-old delinquent was recently released from a juvenile detention center. He returns to his parent's old home with a clean criminal record and a new identity. However, local villagers sense an injustice in this lack of punishment; they remember what happened there just a few years earlier. Also an ambitious filmmaker has decided to follow and document this delinquent's return to a 'normal' life. With the backdrop of contemporary society, where "everything is meaningless and nothing is real", this story of maturity and guilt unfolds.

Marbles

The episodic film MARBLES consists of several short stories about how women manipulate with men. About subtle blackmailings, about crying, about tears, about the ability to sacrifice oneself for a dream, about sex as a service, about the way we can use empathy. It all starts on the playground among children and death does not equal the end. As time goes by, a feminine mechanism of manipulation develops, shapes up, ripens until it reaches the stage of perfection. Individual short stories take place at a techno party as well as in a Catholic parsonage and they conclude in a content domestic routine of two old people which cannot be disrupted by anything – not even by death. The short stories about women of different age and lifestyle put together a story of one complete human life which was, thanks to the manipulation with others, lived according to the plan and at the same time and from the same reason wasted away.