Alexandr Postler

Three detective stories from industrial Ostrava. Police search in vain for a missing 16-year-old girl, but succeed in finding a mentally disturbed infant kidnapper. In a case of robbery, at the cost of injuring one of the investigators, they manage to apprehend a lover fleeing with stolen money across the border to Poland...

A student work by Jiří Menzel, filmed during his second year at the FAMU film school. Views of old Prague and its tenement buildings, symbolizing the obsolete past, alternate with shots of construction sites for new prefabricated apartment buildings. In spite of certain unavoidable propagandistic overtones added by the director, it is notable as the beginning of his search for a “dramaturgy of colors.”

A film in five episodes, all based on an attempt to show the life of young people today, their feelings and relationships, their behaviour in public and private life.

The young generation is not very at peace with the morality of their parents. In a story set in a Moravian village, the otherwise contented cooperators indulge in stealing from the common property without seeing anything wrong with such actions. After being reprimanded by their own children, they first get angry but then become ashamed. The result is a late agitational comedy that no longer deals with the peasants' entry into the agricultural cooperative, but with the mores prevailing there. The ideologically mature youth act as a guarantee of a happy future.

During the Nazi occupation of a Czech city civilians are being rounded up on the slightest of pretexts and shot. One day three high school boys who crack jokes about a recently deceased "hero of the Reich" are pulled out of school by the Gestapo.

Three separate short stories by Jan Drda from the collection The Dumb Barricade: The Dynamite Watchman, Hatred and Traces.

A poor couple waits in vain for a child. The desperate man asks hell itself for help, and the devils grant his wish. Nine months later, the couple gives birth to a son named Nesyta. When he grows up, he sets out into the world. He is not afraid of work and offers help wherever he can, but he discourages everyone with his insatiability. Eventually, he enters the service of the devil himself...