Tag Archives: Czech cinema

Europe in war (film: The Painted Bird – Vaclav Marhoul, 2019)

Posted on December 18, 2020 by admin

‘The Painted Bird‘ (2019) by Czech director Václav Marhoul is a very difficult film to evaluate. On the one hand, from a cinematic point of view, it is one of the remarkable performances we have seen in recent years – … Continue reading →

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the train station in the center of Europe (film: Closely Watched Trains – Jiri Menzel, 1966)

Posted on November 5, 2020 by admin

Films from Czechoslovakia were among the hottest and most interesting topics of world cinema in the mid-60s. In 1966, when he made ‘Closely Watched Trains‘, Jirí Menzel was 28 years old and this was his first feature film. He won … Continue reading →

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a jewel behind the Iron Curtain (Film: Horí, má panenko / The Firemen’s Ball – Milos Forman, 1967)

Posted on March 21, 2020 by admin

‘The Firemen’s Ball‘ (the Czech title is ‘Horí, má panenko‘ – ‘Fire, my doll!’), the last film made in Czechoslovakia by Milos Forman in 1967, before the ‘spring of Prague’ and the exile that moved his career to the West, … Continue reading →

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when citizens take arms (Film: Teroristka – Radek Bajgar, 2019)

Posted on August 18, 2019 by admin

The local cinema offers us each year a meeting with Czech cinema in a week that combines films from the Czechoslovak film school of the 1960s with movies recently produced in the Czech Republic. From this year’s selection I chose … Continue reading →

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the film that has been imprisoned for 20 years (Film: Skrivánci na niti/Larks on a String – Jirí Menzel, 1969/1990)

Posted on August 16, 2018 by admin

It’s 50 years almost day-to-day since the Red Army and the armies of several “fraternal” states invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and put an end to the experiment of socialism with a human face that had been tried by Alexander … Continue reading →

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no hope to cling (Film: I, Olga Olga Hepnarová – 2016)

Posted on August 27, 2017 by admin

For the second consecutive year the cinematheque in my city hosts a Czech Film Festival, and the most interesting film I have seen by now is this work co-directed by Petr Kazda and Tomás Weinreb describing an event that took … Continue reading →

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solid war drama (Film: The Man with the Iron Heart – Cédric Jimenez, 2017)

Posted on August 26, 2017 by admin

The assassination in Prague in 1942 of Reinhardt Heydrich – ‘protector’ of Bohemia and Moravia and one of the planners of the ‘final solution’ – was one of the most spectacular events of WWII. Although it did not change dramatically … Continue reading →

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the horror movie that could have been (Film: The Noonday Witch – Jiri Sádek, 2016)

Posted on September 2, 2016 by admin

I know that it’s some kind of an unfair comparison, but so it happens that I have seen Jiri Sádek‘s The Noonday Witch (the original name is Polednice – Midday) at the Czech film festival, and then Pedro Almodóvar‘s Julieta in … Continue reading →

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in the woods (Film: Schmitke – Stepan Altrichter, 2014)

Posted on August 28, 2016 by admin

The second film that I have seen in the Czech film festival at our local cinematheque was a first long feature film by director Stepan Altrichter, actually a co-production between the German and Czech studios, mostly spoken in German, as … Continue reading →

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family troubles (Film: The Snake Brothers – Jan Prusinovský, 2015)

Posted on August 19, 2016 by admin

This may be the first Czech film that I see in 40 years. The occasion is the Czech film festival hold in my city (and several other Cinematheques) in Israel. The good news are that the Czech cinema seems to … Continue reading →

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