Jiří Kuba

Flexible, powerful, and naive. The fates of three men intersect at the launch of Czechoslovak television broadcasting. Ambitious actor František Filipovský has no idea that his casual improvisation on the theme of "the miser" will go down in history. For Minister of Information Václav Kopecký, it is a moment of great nervousness: will he convince his comrades that television broadcasting is the golden goose of communist propaganda? A young television technician is fascinated by the "remote transmission of images and sound" – he has a job he never dreamed of. But can a person fulfill their dreams in communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s without getting involved with the regime?

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.

Further east of the Dark Blue Sky, where the Heavenly Horsemen fought, the story of a Czechoslovakian fighter squadron takes place, to which Second Lieutenant Jandak arrives as a rookie. He then experiences both his first love and a battle high above the clouds in the collective of combat pilots. Combat pilots on the Eastern Front thus experience similar stories to their Western colleagues, with the same goals and plans and the same slim prospects of survival in their daily life-and-death battles. Not surprisingly, they fought at a time when they had a common enemy, characterised by the Messerschmitt aircraft.

The story of a music academy student Zdenek, who meets a charming girl, and without realizing also gets a son with her. Dealing with such a situation is not easy, especially when one day the child's mother disappears. Twenty year old Zdenek faces a serious decision. Although he is aware that a child may endanger his studies and perhaps even future career, he refuses to entrust him to the care of the state institution.

In the second half of the 1980s, so-called critical films began to emerge, but they were afraid to make a sharper statement, moving on the basis of an engaged morality that wanted to improve the existing conditions cosmetically at best. The theme of the search for a new anchor in life becomes a central element: the protagonist, after returning from the war, does not want to devote himself to the constraints of elite sports, he rejects the dubious business of a friend. Most of all, he would be attracted to a perfectly ordinary job in a bakery. The dance clip inserts, however, make it difficult to navigate the already rather confusing narrative.