Czech films about introspection

In the 1980s, Anna, a Czech sprinter, starts training for the Olympics. After she collapses during training, she learns she is being given steroids and decides to stop using them until her mother helps the coaches give them to her.

A gifted and well-qualified young teacher takes a job teaching natural sciences at a grammar school in the country. Here he makes the acquaintance of a woman and her troubled 17-year old son. The teacher has no romantic interest in the woman but they quickly form a strong friendship, each recognizing the other's uncertainties, hopes and longing for love.

Together, a filmmaker and her characters venture into a personal research project about intimacy. On the fluid border between reality and fiction, Touch Me Not follows the emotional journeys of Laura, Tómas and Christian, offering a deeply empathic insight into their lives. Craving for intimacy yet also deeply afraid of it, they work to overcome old patterns, defense mechanisms and taboos, to cut the cord and finally be free. Touch Me Not looks at how we can find intimacy in the most unexpected ways, at how to love another without losing ourselves.

With the Nazi takeover of Europe underway, the Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich arrives in Prague and his underlings begin enforcing his authority in the towns and villages across the occupied country. In Lidice, the film's main protagonist, František Šíma, is sent to prison following a family dispute that results in the accidental death of one of his sons.

When the Nazis secure a heavy water plant to realize their plan to create an atomic bomb, the Norwegian Allies struggle to sabotage the operation.

“Gorbachev. Heaven” is a documentary film about changes that reverberated throughout the world wrought by one man. A film summing-up the life of a man who changed the world in the 20th century. Gorbachev’s short time in power was marked by the collapse of this empire. He was the architect of Glasnost and Perestroika, policies that gave the citizens of the Soviet Union – what Ronald Reagan called “the Evil Empire” – a chance to be free. He tore down the Berlin Wall. But at the same time, under his rule, the Chernobyl nuclear facility exploded and its destruction was concealed. Citizens demanding independence in the Baltic states died. Soldiers wielding shovels brutally suppressed protesters in Tbilisi. And Soviet tanks menaced, and killed, peaceful demonstrators in Baku. The Soviet empire collapsed under him – and he is condemned by his own people. With this burden of the past, this lonely old man is living the last days of his life in an empty house in the suburbs near Moscow.

A train dispatcher encounters a mute stranger who appears out of nowhere, and finds himself mysteriously involved with a murder in Poland. The end of the eighties in the twentieth century. Alois Nebel works as a dis­patcher at the small railway station in Bílý Potok, a remote village on the Czech–Polish border. He's a loner, who prefers old timetables to people, and he finds the loneliness of the station tranquil – except when the fog rolls in. Then he hallucinates, sees trains from the last hundred years pass through the station. They bring ghosts and shadows from the dark past of Central Eu­rope. Alois can’t get rid of these nightmares and eventually ends up in sanatorium. In the sanatorium, he gets to know The Mute, a man carrying an old photograph who was arrested by the police after crossing the border. No one knows why he came to Bílý Potok or who he’s looking for, but it is his past that propels Alois on his journey…

The most dangerous former operative of the CIA is drawn out of hiding to uncover hidden truths about his past.

Constance, 1410. Marie, daughter of the richest bourgeois of the city, is on the eve of marrying a prestigious lawyer, son of an earl. Although the compromise fills with pride the girl's father, anxious to ennoble, Marie is not just convinced about her fiancé, who she has only seen twice. Her suspicions are confirmed tragically on the eve of the wedding when, after signing the marriage contract, a stranger breaks into the house ensuring that Marie has slept with other men in exchange for gifts, like a vile harlot. From that moment, the life of the girl will give a terrible unexpected turnaround. Alone, with his reputation ruined, she will have no choice to survive than partnering with a prostitute and lying on the roads.

Every country that enforces the death penalty needs people to kill other people. Four men are put in front of an unthinkable but simple choice. Whatever they decide, it will directly or indirectly corrode them selves, their relationships, and their entire lives.

After failing to apprehend the terrorist behind a Paris attack that claimed dozens of lives, CIA agent Alice Racine is forced to live in London as a caseworker. Her mentor unexpectedly calls her back into action when the CIA discovers that another attack is imminent. Alice soon learns that the classified information she's uncovered has been compromised. Running for her life, she turns to a former soldier to help her prevent a lethal biological attack on the citizens of London.

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The story of communist show-trial victim Milada Horáková. Horáková was one of the first victims of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. She opposed the communist coup in 1948 but did not leave the country. She was arrested and tried for treason on fabricated charges in a show trial that was broadcast on the radio and shown in film clips. The film focuses on the time from 1945 to 1950 when the communists took over, but also goes back a little further in Horáková's life into the late 1930s

The Dung Beetle is late, the Parasite is asleep and Mrs Larva is more interested in her knitting than the director’s instructions. It’s clear: this amateur theatre company has a long way to go before they can perform their version of The Insect Play, a famous satirical work from 1922 by the brothers Karel and Josef Čapek which features insects with decidedly human traits: greed, egocentrism, jealousy.

The charismatic and self-confident man, Karel Král, is the editor-in-chief of men's magazine. Although a chauvinistic type, he is very popular with women. However, he struggles in his personal life. He frequently argues with his ex-wife over their 17 year-old daughter Julie, who despises his new way of life. Then the consequences of his behavior catch up with him. He loses his job, and the editor-in-chief position is given to a young and beautiful woman. But his bad luck does not end there. After another fight with his ex-wife and daughter, and a woman driver crashing into his car, Karel and his best friend Cestmír have an evening of binge drinking. During the wild night, he expresses a wish to be a woman. When he wakes up the next morning he discovers that his wish has been granted.

After a fictitious marriage with a Russian emigrant, Cellisten Louka, a Czech man, must suddenly take responsibility for her son. However, it’s not long before the communication barrier is broken between the two new family members.

Harvie is a smart but a bit too lively boy with one ambition, to finish the last level of his computer game. Once in the Gamers Hall of Fame, his absent-minded father, would finally be proud of him. But finishing the game turns out to be only the start of a real adventure that takes Harvie, his dog Jerry, and his friend Monica deep into the forgotten realms of the city's old puppet museum.

Young Ondra has asthma and so his parents throw away his favourite toy: a musty old stuffed bear named Kooky. That night Ondra dreams that Kooky is determined to find his way back home from the dump. In the boy's fantasy, the bear gets lost in a forest occupied by strange animals and remarkable beings that he never heard of while living on the toy shelf in Ondra's room. And of course even in this small imaginary world, true good exists as does real evil, which Kooky must face up to in order to become a real hero.

North Carolina mountains at the end of the 1920s – George and Serena Pemberton, love-struck newly-weds, begin to build a timber empire. Serena soon proves herself to be equal to any man: overseeing loggers, hunting rattle-snakes, even saving a man’s life in the wilderness. With power and influence now in their hands, the Pembertons refuse to let anyone stand in the way of their inflated love and ambitions. However, once Serena discovers George’s hidden past and faces an unchangeable fate of her own, the Pemberton’s passionate marriage begins to unravel leading toward a dramatic reckoning.

A story about Janina Duszejko, an elderly woman, who lives alone in the Klodzko Valley where a series of mysterious crimes are committed. Duszejko is convinced that she knows who (or what) is the murderer, but nobody believes her.

A film about the black-and-white era actress Lída Baarová and her doomed love affair.

The film tells about the history of the Holocaust through the stories of its unwitting Witnesses.

GHOUL is a supernatural horror film involving the real life story of the Soviet Union's most violent serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo. Three Americans travel to the Ukraine to film a documentary about the cannibalism epidemic that swept through the country during the famine of 1932. After being lured deep into the Ukraine forest for an interview with one of the last known survivors, they quickly find themselves trapped in a supernatural hunting ground.

Queen Margrete is ruling Sweden, Norway and Denmark through her adopted son, Erik. But a conspiracy is in the making and Margrete finds herself in an impossible dilemma that could shatter her life's work: the Kalmar Union.

Jumping back and forth between modern and medieval France, the lives of two women separated by centuries, are united in their search for an ancient artifact.

In a future where a failed global-warming experiment kills off most life on the planet, a class system evolves aboard the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe via a perpetual-motion engine.

From Paris in the 1960s to London in the first decade of the third millennium, Madeleine and her daughter Véra flit from one amorous adventure to the next, living for the moment and taking all the opportunities that life offers. But not every love affair is without its consequences, its upsets and its disappointments. As time goes by and gnaws away at one’s deepest feelings, love becomes a harder game to play.

A CIA agent gets caught up in political intrigue after he gets brought in to solve the murder of a Cuban ambassador.

A drama loosely based on Jean Bernard's Nazi-era prison diary.

Arnost Lustig was one of the world's most renowned literary authors of our times. Lustig's novel 'A girl from Antwerp' upon which our film Colette is based, draws on the author's personal Nazi Concentration Camp experience and his own recollection of several escape attempts from the hell of Auschwitz. The story of The Pulitzer Prize nominee Lustig is about the power of love under an extreme life circumstances. It is a story of young lovers and their vigorous determination to escape from a hopeless life condition and theirs courage to face death.

In the former Czechoslovakia, 1950s, police captain Hakl investigates a jewelery robbery. An opened safe deposit leads to a known burglar. What seems an easy case soon starts to tangle. When he is called off the case, he continues on his own. The investigation leads him onto thin ice. Can he beat a stronger enemy and save his family and his own life?

Set in a world where love is deemed illegal and can be eradicated with a special procedure. With 95 days to go until her scheduled treatment, Lena Holoway does the unthinkable, she falls in love.

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The 10 Rules comedy tells a story of a shy scientist Marek who falls hopelessly in love with a seemingly inaccessible girl. His friends determined to help him, call Marek’s father, a successful publisher of books on the subject of how to get a woman. Together, they begin to develop a very peculiar course on girl psychology. However, do these 10 sure-fire rules apply exactly as described in the books?

The story of 14th century Czech icon and warlord Jan Zizka who defeated armies of the Teutonic Order and the Holy Roman Empire.

The account of keepers of the Warsaw Zoo, Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who helped save hundreds of people and animals during the Nazi invasion.

Spitz is the German-Jewish coach of the football team Macedonia during World War II. Under his leadership, the team fights to become the champion of Bulgaria's National Football League

The inspiring true story of Seretse Khama, the King of Bechuanaland (modern Botswana), and Ruth Williams, the London office worker he married in 1948 in the face of fierce opposition from their families and the British and South African governments. Seretse and Ruth defied family, Apartheid and empire - their love triumphed over every obstacle flung in their path and in so doing they transformed their nation and inspired the world.

A story set in a small village in Sudetenland between 1937 and 1945. "Habermann" is based on true events.

Two young technicians, Filos and Kája, come to a small village that is a bit cut off from the rest of the world in order to find the best place to install a new station for the reception of a cell phone signal. Their arrival understandably arouses a feeling of expectation among the locals, especially when they learn of the interesting financial reward for the owner of the land on which the transmitter will stand. A fight flares up in the village over this reward, and all weapons, those permitted and those not, are put into use. Of course, there is also the question of whether Filos and Kája will be able to live up to the expectations that have been placed on them. Maybe they aren't even who they claim to be...

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