Vladimír Marek

North Carolina mountains at the end of the 1920s – George and Serena Pemberton, love-struck newly-weds, begin to build a timber empire. Serena soon proves herself to be equal to any man: overseeing loggers, hunting rattle-snakes, even saving a man’s life in the wilderness. With power and influence now in their hands, the Pembertons refuse to let anyone stand in the way of their inflated love and ambitions. However, once Serena discovers George’s hidden past and faces an unchangeable fate of her own, the Pemberton’s passionate marriage begins to unravel leading toward a dramatic reckoning.

Jakub, a young, small time drug dealer, wakes up to find the police storming the apartment building while his parents are both away on holiday. After flushing all of his "secret stashes" in the toilet, he finds out they are actually there to investigate the death of the girl upstairs, a close childhood friend of his and the family. He slowly retraces the past week that she has been lying dead in her flat and remembers that he asked her to "receive a package" unbeknownst to her from his drug dealer, Pexeso.

In 1943, a childless couple, the Čížeks, decide to hide a Jewish refugee, David Wiener, the son of Čížek's former employer, in the secret pantry of their apartment. Čížek is aware of the danger into which he has brought his household and his neighbours, but he takes helping his fellow man in need for granted. But at the same time, as a largely unheroic hero, he is dying of fear. His personal situation is greatly complicated by the approaching end of the war, when he faces danger from both the Germans and his "honest" fellow Czechs...

Young man in the prison is obsessed with a singer who is to perform in a new musical its director is currently auditioning for. He escapes and through complex and often very funny series of events ends up being the main star of the musical, only to be discovered by the police the day before the premiere...OK, enough spoilers! The story keeps going on... Lots of great dialogs, awesome music and singing, and ever-twisting story (plus, the parallels between the play's script and the real story) makes this one of the most enjoyable Czech movies I've seen in years (and I've seen many)! Definitely check it out if you like comedy, drama, musicals, and theater.

Katharina’s husband Richard vanishes in Prague. She uncovers his fake EU job, affair with Vera, and theft from the Russian mafia after Vera’s father’s murder. With help from undercover cop Bové, she learns Richard isn’t a killer but entangled in crime, then boldly confronts mafia boss Orlov.

The distinctive artist, typographer, and writer Josef Váchal is known to the public primarily for his Blood Novel. The surrealistic exuberance of this defense of 19th-century pulp fiction caught the attention of Jaroslav Brabec and his colleagues, who found a corresponding image of 20th-century "trash." The authors' interest focuses primarily on the silent film era, with a journey through the history of cinema continuing through the advent of sound film to the present day (auteur cinema of the 1960s, modern horror), formally employing techniques such as tinted film. The versatile parody intertwines a colorful plot with the story of the author (Váchal/Paseky), who comments on and creates his book, and is further split in the plot into the characters of Fragonard and the Master. As with Váchal, reality increasingly enters the fiction, so that the only "happy ending" turns out to be the artist's finished work.

A balladic fairy tale about the underground kingdom of goblins, based on Irish fairy tales. When darkness and rainy clouds gathering low in the sky increase, when October turns into November, everyone in Ireland celebrates Halloween. The eve of All Saints' Day is a time when children run around outside in picturesque masks, adults raise their mugs by the light of flickering torches in hollowed-out turnips, and the world of goblins comes to life underground. It is the only day when these creatures, no bigger than a grown mouse, can enter the human world, and also when mortals can enter their realm. And so Paddy, a young innkeeper generally considered a fool and a child, finds himself in the Moss Hall through a magical well and, in his kindness and desire for love, breaks the laws of the underworld.

Young English gentleman Richard travels with his uncle Archibald to Prague, Czech kingdom. There he meets a beautiful girl Olivia, a young noblewoman with a secret. They fall in love with each other but he doesn't know Olivia is a companion of evil count Kronberg, ruler of pack of Prague vampires.

Teenager Kristina Kleinburger, daughter of the commander of a concentration camp, arrives from bombed-out Berlin to visit her parents, whose life represents a world of harmony and peace for her. Her parents try to reinforce her illusions with ballet lessons, which are to be given by a former Hungarian prima ballerina. In a single day, contrary to the intentions and plans of her father, a typical German officer, Kristina's ideas and illusions about her parents' society and the security of home collapse, and the whole perversity and monstrosity of the German war and totalitarian mechanism emerges before her with tragic inexorability and the echo of the approaching end of the war. The story, setting, and characters of the film are fictional, only the tragedy of their fates is real.

The movie is based on the narrative of a Czech multimillionaire who achieved success not by stripping companies, making crooked deals and crony-ism, but by blazing his own trail like Schweikesque self-made man. He realizes early on that he has nobody but himself to rely on. During the totalitarian regime of the 80s, he ambles along his oddball path and then experiences the Velvet Revolution atypically, too - in an asylum amidst nut-cases. After the Revolution, he really gets rolling. To Germany and back. To prison and back. To China and back. The intriguing and endless opportunities afforded by the Internet eventually blossom into virtual prosperity. The hero has everything and is even planning a highly unorthodox family. A happy ending is nigh, until everything goes up in smoke, of course...

When a band of robbers menaces the realm, the Duke of the Winter Castle sends his enchanted, crystal-tipped sword to his friend Matěj the blacksmith for sharpening, only for the magical gem to vanish without a trace. As Matěj joins the Duke’s campaign to reclaim the blade, the Duke’s daughter Johanka and a spiteful curse from the smith’s heartbroken wife threaten to derail their quest and doom the kingdom.

A naive village girl, Valentýna, arrives in Prague and, under dramatic circumstances, becomes reluctantly entangled in the Karlín underworld as a novice prostitute controlled by the slimy gangster Pavouk and his bumbling henchman Milan. She repeatedly refuses the genuine support offered by the incorruptible mounted policeman Viktor Sokol, even as two eccentric observers serve as a choric commentary on the absurdities around them. Through parodic and poetic scenes, ranging from western-inspired mounted police sequences to a surreal “war” over exporting plastic gnomes, the film satirizes contemporary Czech society.

A tribe of survivors take possession of a large but rundown building, killing all who put up resistance - but they don't know that the building is cursed by some demon god and haunted by a girl in white that seems to know a dark secret.

Where has Prince Rujan disappeared to? Has he gone to slay a dragon? But where is the dragon? Military veteran Plavák, with the help of the dwarf Trpaja and Princess Aurora, uncovers even more. A Czech Television fairy tale about the victory of love and goodness, but also about the wisdom and mature decisions that the heirs of ruling dynasties come to in their new positions. Prince Rujan of the Kingdom of Arcadia kills the dragon to which the princess of the Principality of Aquitaine was to be sacrificed. We can rejoice that good has triumphed once again, but it won't be that easy. We are at the very beginning of a story in which evil will sometimes prevail and the injustices of the past will come back to haunt the new generation. The old familiar truth that every evil deed will eventually come back to haunt you is reflected in the fate of all fairy-tale heroes.

Czech Century brings the key moments of the history of the Czech nation from 1918 to 1989.