Petr Svojtka

Popelka, a resourceful and independent young girl, is a servant in her stepmother's house and confides in her closest friend the owl. When she comes across three magical acorns, she's granted a single wish for each one of them.

A wonderful fairytale about looking for love, defeating evil and learning some valuable moral lessons on the way. The story begins with the young Prince Velen, who is left in charge of the castle and his three sisters. During the night he has a visitation and before he knows it, all his sisters are married off and gone away, and himself falls in love with beautiful Večernice. Now he is faced with the King's wraths and charged with a quest. The journey, however, hides obstacles and danger; not only treacherous merchants and robbers, but also a evil wizard Mrakomor...

The little mermaid rescues a prince from drowning and falls in love with him. To be with him, she makes a deal with the evil sorceress: her beautiful voice against a life on land.

The female employees of the poultry-processing factory find relief from their monotonous work in chatting about weddings and marriages. The very young Zdena (Marta Vancurová), too, dreams about a white veil and an entourage of bridesmaids. On her return home from work, she runs into a peculiar man on an abandoned road who pertinaciously offers to read her palm for a few crowns to buy soup. His augury is rather usual - wealth and poverty, suffering and happiness. Then however, he declares that Zdena must marry exactly on 3 November of that year otherwise she will be unhappy.

Autumn 1944. A doctor is accused in the collaboration with the Nazis and found guilty...

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...

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.

Françoise, a French sociology student, moves to Czechoslovakia to write her thesis. She falls in love with Pavel, a professor. But the events of the "Prague Spring" begin and Pavel decides to collaborate. Françoise returns to France and meets up with her militant friends on the eve of the events of May 68 in Paris.

Two young returnees from the First World War face a difficult future because they cannot find work. One eventually finds a job as an electrician, the other breaks into the Social Democratic press, where he gets the chance to watch up close how the Social Democratic leadership deceives its members and enters the service of the ruling classes. And a newly-trained journalist solves the problem of whether he should also adapt to the corrupt environment...

The dramatic story captures the hard and dangerous life of the partisan group "Čapajev" led by Ľudovít Kukorelli during World War II. It retrospectively presents the course of the Slovak National Uprising in eastern Slovakia.

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

A dark fable set in an early 1950s Czech village, a time of Soviet-style socialism which saw the implementation of collectivized agriculture and the mass closure of monasteries and convents.

The film from 1976, a film that is exemplary in its devotion to the canons of normalised cinema, is the work of director Stanislav Strnad. He brought to life the script of an unusual author - the secretary of the SČDU, Arno Kraus - in this psychological drama. The protagonist of the story also has his cadre materials in order according to the requirements of the time - he is a worker director Kabát, who besides problems at the workplace also copes successfully with difficulties in his private life - a break-up with his wife.

It's New Year's Eve afternoon and Honza, Jana and Zdeněk decide to go out into the karst area. Despite the express ban, one of them goes down into an unknown underground tunnel. When he doesn't return for a long time, the others go looking for him. But they soon discover that they are not enough on their own. Only the best rescuer, Karel Nousek, can save him. However, he is dealing with a complicated life situation. He loves his colleague's wife and is about to solve a love triangle. That evening, Olga wants to tell her husband that she is breaking up with him because of Nousek...

In the 1950s, selected basic soldiers in a small border unit guard the western border with devotion, fighting intruders and uncovering their network of facilitators. It's a story of border guards that thankfully wasn't much of a political nudge, more of a tongue-in-cheek tale of young men at war and their joys and sorrows. And in between, they managed to catch a saboteur.

This documentary-style story tells the story of an aspiring documentary filmmaker who is preparing a film about the history of glassmaking. He is honestly gathering information, slowly getting closer to an unknown and not always accessible environment, to people, whose actions he often doesn't understand because he misses their motivations... Shards for Eva is certainly not a skillfully wrought work, but it certainly impresses with its sense of at least partial capture of everyday reality.

The film was based on the novel "Milión" by Karel Štorkán. The book and the film depict the events surrounding the great construction disaster in Prague in 1928, in which 46 construction workers died. The disaster thrilled the entire republic at the time, yet was never fully explained. The filmmakers focus on the story of Ing. Vondrák, the designer of the construction.

It is 5 May 1945 and the uprising against the hated German occupiers has broken out in Prague. The Czech guards open the gate of the Pankrác prison to allow the prisoners to escape en masse. Many of them are shot dead by the German guards but young Ruda (Jaromír Hanzlík) manages to run away. He is taken care of by one of the Prague fighters, concierge Kytka. Kytka hides him in the flat of the house's owner where only the young maid Karla (Jana Brejchová) is left, ordering her to take care of Ruda.

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.

Summer 1968: The crisis is reaching its peak. The director of the Prague taxi service, Mudroch, rejects the drivers' absurd demands for a pay increase. The taxi drivers decide to go on strike and seek support against Murdoch from trade unionists and enemies of the regime. The director is convinced that honest communists like him cannot be defeated. However, hateful vandals damage the brakes in his car...

Thirty Cases of Major Zeman is a Czechoslovak action-drama television show intended as a political propaganda to support the official attitude of the communist party. The series were filmed in the 1970s. Each episode encompasses one year, and investigations are stylized to that year. Most are inspired by real cases. The series follows the life of police investigator Jan Zeman during his career from 1945 to 1975.

Arabela was a children's television series produced in Czechoslovakia which aired from 1979 to 1981. The series has 13 episodes and is in the Czech language.

Inženýrská odysea is a Czechoslovak/Czech TV series about three young students and their lives.

Okres na severu is a Czechoslovak/Czech TV series filmed by Evžen Sokolovský in 1981.