Ingrid Ištóková

Tragicomic family film about the world of children heroes - particularly the son of a local communist officer and his friend, a little hostage of the regime, whose parents emigrated to the West, few years before "Prague Spring" and the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Camaraderie, the first big discoveries of love, enemy gang fights and naive ideas are confronted with the reality of adult's world. The film is about the first contacts with bizarre and absurd reality of relationships and attitudes of adults, politics, emigration, but also betrayal and death and about how all those things form and transform the lives of small boys, who are forced to grow up too quickly.

This two-part production follows the lives of three generations of women from the Jablonczay family at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The first part begins in 1882 and focuses on the two older generations. The eldest, Maria (Emília Vášáryová), lives in a dead relationship with her husband Kálmán (Milan Kněžko). She is the mother of a son and three daughters, each of whom tries to cope with her despotic nature in different ways. In the second part, the youngest, third generation of characters enters the scene. Lenka (Zuzana Vačková) is first educated in a convent with the kind approach of the mother superior (Magda Vášáryová) and slowly gets to know the real world outside the convent and her strict family environment. The play is based on the novel by Hungarian prose writer Magda Szabó, originally titled "An Old-Fashioned Story," in which the author describes the family life of her own ancestors.

A tragicomic story about the "hug" that all the characters long for, especially sociologist Oskar, an indecisive loser whose daily bizarre encounters with old people in nursing homes lead to feelings of futility, emptiness, and loss of vital energy, which reinforce his refusal to bring a child into this meaningless world. However, his wife's desire for motherhood grows.

A new teacher arrives at the school and discovers in sixth-grader Linda a talented and sensitive girl who bravely struggles with the growing problems of her age. "Magic" awakens in her the will to overcome the insurmountable - to believe in herself. The fact that Linda is able to pass on her experience to her little protégé, first-grader Mishka, is proof that she has succeeded.