Soňa Valentová

In the 1600s, an overzealous clergy hauls innocent women in front of tribunals, forces them to confess to imaginary witchery, and engages in brutal torture and persecution of their subjects.

A fairy-tale about an old lady who takes care of snow and Jakub who does not fear death. It reflects the idea of people's longing for happiness, love and understanding, their effort to overcome troubles and win over death. It criticizes greed and evil desires.

In the aftermath of war, two men and a woman begin acting more like children than adults, leading to tragedy.

A young woman, married to a wealthy man, but miserably lonely; trapped within a world ruled with an iron fist. Katerina is driven by a lust for life and for love. Her husband, though, is impotent; her father-in-law a tyrant. No wonder, then, that she longs to free herself from this yoke. When Sergei starts work on the family estate, she sees in him a chance for salvation. However, their subsequent affair marks the beginning of a descent into crime.

51-year-old Herbert Strehlow, a furniture restorer, falls in love with 21-year-old Lea, who has not spoken a word since childhood when her father killed her mother. She bears a striking resemblance to Herbert's dead wife. They get married, but their relationship seems doomed, until gradually each one manages to penetrate the mysterious world of the other, and they begin to realize that they are bound by a kind of spiritual relationship. For Lea it is the death of her mother, for Herbert it is the death of his first wife. His hard exterior slowly beings to thaw, and he starts to show feelings and responses that soften Lea's initial hatred and fear of him, and which put their relationship in a more positive light.

A story of Jan Kolvara, forty years old architect, who is a little bit too obsessed with women in his life.

Father Holy, a village priest, battles against the state and religious bureaucracies of 1980s Czechoslovakia in his fight to raise money for a new church roof. Permeated by his love for the villagers, his encounters are marked by his good humor. In his losing battle against Church and State, Holy is ordered to be transferred away from his parish and his allies. The Czech-American, Milena Jelinek, adapted this moving story from the the novel The Forgotten Light, by the 1930s Czech writer/poet and Catholic priest Jakub Deml. (1934)

A handsome young man trades his soul so that his portrait ages while he stays eternally young.