Mikuláš Novotný

Divine Sparks

Thirteen-year-old Czech boy and a Belgian girl of the same age who meet at a roadhouse facility want to meet and talk to each other in a short time between lunch and their departure. With the help of an Arab truck driver and an African football player, they overcome the language barrier and manage to spend a few minutes without their families. Both share a modern European experience in this modest location. "Divine Sparks" offers a pleasant story about the power of communication and prejudices.

Communism and the Net, or the End of Representative Democracy

The six-hour essay in four parts examines the history of regimes and revolutions, leaders and martyrs, from a philosophical perspective. The collage of personal memories, staged scenes and archives of collective memory compares the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution and shows the exposure, conflict, crisis, and catharsis of the post-communist society.

Fortress

This Czech documentary presents a visit to the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (a.k.a. Trans-Dniestr) as a trip to a museum of communist totalitarianism. The country, whose independence has been recognized by only a few other states, remains an isolated multi-ethnic enclave held together by an authoritarian regime. In a country where you are only allowed to film out the window of a train, the locals are afraid of being denounced but are glad to live in a comfortable refuge from the hectic modern world, and songs on television celebrate the president.

Long Live the Family!

Libor, a former teacher, enjoys a well-paid position as a bank manager, living in a luxurious villa outside Prague. His business partners are taken into custody and the authorities have a few questions for him to answer. Rather than wait around, he decides to take off to Moravia with his wife and two children. In the process, he pretends that everything is normal, rediscovers the value of family life, meets up with a former colleague lost in provincial obscurity, and becomes the object of a manhunt. Libor is not a criminal type, merely someone who signs cheques and is drawn into a business world failing to recognise its own criminality (he doesn’t even flee the country).

Obscurantist and His Lineage or The Pyramids' Tearful Valley

Karel Vachek’s latest documentary essay deals with the fine line between an internal belief in God and institutionalized religion. At the same time it brings up the need for a healthy sense of skepticism and the benefit of not believing in anything that advertises itself as certain. The filmmaker sets out for the USA, Japan, Great Britain, Poland, and the Balkans in his sometimes amusing investigation of spiritual substitutes, such as esoteric "teachings” or various fraudulent and magical practices, to which we sometimes fall prey due to our natural religious cravings. In addition to a Czech "prefab” family, who describe the carryings-on of their poltergeist, well-known mystery buffs appear in the film: Erich von Däniken, Raymond Moody Jr., and Ivan Mackerl.

The Greatest Czechs

Film crew on the road: Director (Jaroslav Plesl), his Producer (Simona Babcáková), and their Director of Photography (Jirí Vyorálek) and Sound Arist (Johana Svarcova). Starving artists who already have a number of films to their names, Czech Lion award-winning films, excellent reviews and have been screened at numerous festivals, but they don't have audiences. Their next collaborative effort - the Director's lifetime dream - is quickly becoming oblivion because he failed to win a grant, which means it won't be made. And so the frustrated Director and his colleagues await their chance among record-holders of curious disciplines such as crawling with a squash racket or collecting four-leaf clovers. How will the collision of these two worlds end? What will the Director's next film be about?

Hunger Strike Breakfast

Having lost their jobs due to a Soviet takeover of Lithuanian Television in 1991, its employees declare a hunger strike in protest. Initial enthusiasm is slowly replaced by frustration about a single question – how long can they hold physical and emotional hunger?