Oldřich Slavík

Tom Thumb's evil stepmother exploits him amd makes his life very hard, so the little shepherd boy decides to leave home and seek happiness in the world outside. There Tom Thumb meets the Wind Mother, Forest Mother and a little old man on his way. Each of them gives him a chore to do that earns him a gift with magical power, which comes in handy when he has to defeat Scrooges, Lop-Eared Man and the Devil himself. While traveling in the world and looking for happiness, he realises he misses his grandmother and little sister...

Between 1924 and 1934, six children grow up in an apartment building in the Munich suburbs. Among them is the rather inconspicuous and melancholy Leo Knie, who has been in love with the pretty Marilli Kosemund since early childhood. Marilli is not averse to the young man's advances, but she wants to be conquered. But that is exactly what shy Leo finds difficult. So he escapes into harmless dancing with his buddies, pursues other girls - rather unsuccessfully - and resigns himself to his predetermined fate.

When a young princess, instead of being fully dedicated to her love, persists in running around like a tomboy and roaming the forests with her gang, and a young prince refuses to give up all his vices and mischief, an aquaphobic fairy takes their fate into her hands. The princess then falls in love with the prince, who declares eternal fidelity to her. When he however breaks this promise, the fairy turns him into a frog. With which the loyalty of the princess is being tested as well.

When he returns to Prague from a stint in the Army, Lada does not seem to fit in anywhere, and he cannot get the hang of the system of deliberately underperforming on the job. His girlfriend tries to keep him in the city with a variety of stratagems, but he eventually takes a job as a truck driver on a dam-building project. He uses the truck to visit his girl on weekends. Ingenuous, he is unaware that the truck is being used for black-market smuggling, and that his girlfriend two-times on him when he cannot arrange to leave on time for his weekend.

A successful scientist dares to openly and forcefully criticize the unproductive activities of the institute in which he works. He draws attention to outdated procedures and also to the fact that scientific work must not fall into the abyss of mediocrity and everyday grayness, so typical of the entire society. Will his career withstand this situation?

This downbeat, grim drama about three brothers who are reunited at their mother's funeral is actually visually as dark as its story, making it difficult at times to clearly distinguish a scene. These brothers are not particularly exceptional as people go, but at least they have branched out into separate vocations in their lives. One brother is a doctor, another is a criminal, and the third is a bus driver. Like others in Europe, they suffered through World War II, yet no matter what their backgrounds and experiences, their interpersonal relationships are not exactly gripping drama.

This tale is about young Ludvik (Robert Nespor) an erstwhile, budding scientist whose practical sense leads him to experiment before his common sense has figured out the results. Due to that unfortunate pattern, he variously floods the bathroom while working on displacement of volume and weight in water, he shatters the harvest pumpkins but not the law of gravity, and now he is eyeing the neighbor's rabbits for an electricity experiment. While the rabbits remain safe for awhile, Ludvik's parents wish he would follow in their more traditional footsteps and dedicate himself to music. Instead, Ludvik has learned that the proper mixture of a certain carbide and water can be explosive, and while he works on that technique, a friend tips off the physics teacher about these potentially disastrous plans.

The lives of 7 friends in a small Czech town from 1945 to some time after 1958.