Directed by: Věra Chytilová
Czechoslovakia, 1963, 82 min

Helena Třeštíková presents

The film alternates between the daily lives of its two heroines; one is Czech Olympic gymnast Eva Bosáková and the other is a housewife. Chytilová always countered attempts to view her feature-film debut as a mere confrontation between two different attitudes to life.

Directed by: Orson Welles
France, Spain, Switzerland, 1965, 113 min

Viktor Tauš presents

Supreme loyalty to the spirit of Shakespeare’s plays and the ultimate in cinematic mastery… If anyone were seeking this sort of calibre in the hundreds of Romeos and Juliets, Hamlets and Othellos they would never find anything that came remotely close to Orson Welles’s Falstaff. The endearingly libertine companion to Prince Hal (the future Henry V) is the natural, early Renaissance “godfather” of all great Wellesian fraudsters, inexorably bound to representatives of Order, who, sooner or later, reject and betray them – in the name of Law and Truth.

Directed by: Marco Ferreri
France, Italy, 1976, 118 min

Jitka Rudolfová presents

As early as the 1970s Ferreri was already banking on what today’s dramatists have developed even further, when he gave inner conflicts a physical, shocking and critical form. He was obsessed by the mechanisms of power games and saw what they did to couples’ relationships, where the man and woman are never able to form a harmonic union.

Directed by: Maurice Pialat
France, 1974, 82 min

Olmo Omerzu presents

Birth, childhood and youth, adulthood, falling in love, old age, death: few elect to depict the last of the various stages that constitute our lives. And virtually no-one has succeeded in capturing those final moments in a film – what they mean for the person who is dying and also for those gathered round the deathbed. Pialat’s work, hovering between a raw portrayal and a quasi-metaphysical contemplation, is simply a masterpiece.

Directed by: Lindsay Anderson
United Kingdom, 1973, 178 min

David Ondříček presents

In this second part of Anderson’s sarcastic trilogy bringing a taste of 1960s England, we meet Mick Travis as a company salesman who becomes an incredulous guide through a corrupt society. Malcolm McDowell once again excels in the main role, captured in the lens of Miroslav Ondříček, who also stood behind the camera for the director’s two previous pictures.

Directed by: Otakar Vávra
Czechoslovakia, 1966, 86 min

Jan Hřebejk presents

The wistful call of the bugle rises above this lyrical story of first love, which takes hold over the course of a summer and ends with the death of the hero’s grandfather. A sense of anguish marks the boy's coming of age, a formative experience that viewers share as they are swept along by the force of Vávra’s poetic style.

Directed by: Štefan Uher
Czechoslovakia, 1962, 90 min

Miroslav Janek presents

First love isn’t always about romance: Two young people in the middle of a big city endeavour to find their place in the world and discover who they really are, while experiencing a measure of anguish along the way. Uher’s film ushered in the Czechoslovak New Wave, a movement that focused on authentic heroes and their singular experience of reality.