• Screenplay Lukáš Kokeš, Klára Tasovská
• Director Lukáš Kokeš, Klára Tasovská
• Producer Tomáš Hrubý, Pavla Janoušková Kubečková
• Co-producer HBO Europe

They are 19 years old, lead normal teenage lives, and attend the same school in a small Czech border town. The film portrays Teo, Renata, Anicka, and Nikola at a time when looming adulthood is beginning to cast an anxious shadow over their carefree high school existence. Each of them faces a momentous challenge whose outcome will change their life forever. And it’s not only about leaving exams. Who will succeed, who will fail, and who will truly come of age? The camera is virtually one with the characters for the most part, immersing the viewer in the world of each protagonist. Dynamic editing underscores the young generation’s restlessness and lack of focus. Nothing Like Before offers a cinematically captivating look into the lives of teenagers forced to grow up sooner than they would like.

• Screenplay Veronika Jonášová
• Director Veronika Jonášová
• Producer Pavla Janoušková Kubečková
• Co-producer Česká televize

“If a child can’t change a person, nothing ever will.”

Andy, Petra, and Bára. Three lives that come together in the penitentiary in SvětlánadSázavou, which has a block for mothers who can have their children with them as they serve out their sentences. The bond of motherhood can, after all, be the most powerful motivation for leading a better and more responsible life.

Between pondering their offences and caring for their children, they all have the same, one thing running through their minds – gaining their yearned-for freedom as soon as possible. The turning point comes when freedom is within the women’s grasp. While they each different terms of release, and each have a different home life, they are nonetheless all connected by maternal love. But will that be enough to keep them out of jail?

The realities of everyday life take the place of the routines of daily life in the prison. The certainties of life behind bars are replaced by a lack of work, concerns about the children, and the struggle to fit in in society. All three of the women yearned for freedom, but will they learn to live with it?

• Screenplay Olga Tokarczuk, Agnieszka Holland
• Director Agnieszka Holland
• Producer Krzysztof Zanussi, Janusz Wachala
• Co-producer Pavla Janoušková Kubečková, Tomáš Hrubý, Johannes Rexin, Fredrik Zander, Jakub Viktorín

‘I’m now at that age and state of mind, where I always wash my feet before going to bed. I mean, just in case I’d have to be carted away to a hospital during the night.’ - Janina Duszejko

Duszejko, an eccentric retired construction engineer, an astrologist and a vegetarian, lives in a small mountain village on the Czech-Polish border. One day her beloved dogs disappear. A few months later she discovers a dead body of her neighbour, a poacher. The only traces leading to the mysterious death are those of roe deer hooves around the house… As time goes by, more grisly killings are discovered. The victims, all hunters, belonged to the local elite. The police investigation proves ineffective. Duszejko has her own theory: all murders were committed by wild animals…

Spoor is a crime/mysterious thriller depicting our schizophrenic moral attitudes toward animal and human rights. It’s a film about how oddballs and weirdos can be more normal than the normal. 

• Screenplay Hynek Trojánek
• Director Filip Pošivač
• Producer Pavla Janoušková Kubečková
• Co-producer Stream.cz

Sorry, this entry is only available in Czech.

• Screenplay Štěpán Hulík
• Director Ivan Zachariáš, Alice Nellis
• Producer Tereza Polachová, Steve Matthews, Antony Root, Tomáš Hrubý, Pavla Janoušková Kubečková
• Co-producer

The series opens with an event that will have a life-changing effect on all the members of a close-knit, multi-generational village community in Northern Bohemia. Just as the mayor of Wasteland, Hana Sikorova, reaches the peak of her struggle against a large, foreign mining company that is eager to access the huge coal reserves that lie beneath the village, and is offering villagers attractive compensation in exchange for selling their homes, her fourteen-year old daughter Misha goes missing. As long-standing family relationships begin to disintegrate, Hana starts to doubt the integrity of every member of her community. Initially helpful in the desperate search for the missing Misa, the citizens of Wasteland soon begin to reveal their true colors.

• Screenplay Rozálie Kohoutová, Tomáš Bojar
• Director Rozálie Kohoutová, Tomáš Bojar
• Producer Pavla Janoušková Kubečková
• Co-producer HBO Europe

Last season a new team joined the lowest level of the Czech football league. FC Roma is a Děčín-based district club made up primarily of players of Roma origin. ‘If I don’t like someone, I want to beat them’, says their trainer Pavel Horváth. However, the other competing teams see things differently and the majority of them boycott the Roma team. This marks the start of an unusual season for FC Roma. Sometimes the match is played, other times not. Nothing is certain in advance and the team wins most of their matches by default. However, the FC Roma players never lose their sense of humour and continue their battle, both on the pitch as well as off it. Sometimes it is harder than they imagined it would be: their practice balls disappear, some of the team’s players are hooked on marihuana, the other teams’ fans shout at them to get a job… But as far as the football competition rankings are concerned, the team continues going up. Will the team succeed and move up to a higher level of the football league, thus proving to everyone that they are not aggressive bullies but that they simply want to play football?

• Screenplay Ondřej Cikán, Anatol Vitouch
• Director Antonín Šilar, Ondřej Cikán
• Producer Die Gruppe
• Co-producer FAMU, nutprodukce, Magiclab

An experimental, feature-lenght adventure-movie based on the novel by Ondřej Cikán.

A kidnapped bride. A distraught hero. Odysseys through surreal worlds. At her wedding to Menandros, Thaïs is carried off by pirates. On his search for her, the bridegroom becomes a bloodthirsty avenger, his horse grows wings, a witch promises him another woman, King Xerxes attempts to unman him, but eventually everything comes to a happy ending. Or does it?

https://www.facebook.com/MenandrosThais

• Screenplay Iva K. Jestřábová
• Director Filip Pošivač, Barbora Valecká
• Producer Pavla Janoušková Kubečková
• Co-producer Stream.cz, Nadační fond Filmtalent Zlín

In the midst of a deep forest live tiny elves resembling humans, Josephine and Bertie. Bertie’s job is to look after some very special jingly mushrooms – night lamps – which he lights up and puts out every day. The only one that can give him some really hard times with her nutty ideas is his sister Josephine. Josephine takes care of a group of fussy red mushrooms who grow near their house – she powders their cheeks, cleans their hats and makes sure they don´t argue too much. The little elves would live happily but one day a little water nymph Rusalka appears and Bertie´s mushrooms start disappearing…

• Screenplay Vojtěch Kiss
• Director Vojtěch Kiss
• Producer Vojtěch Kiss
• Co-producer Tomáš Hrubý, Pavla Kubečková

The movie presents a vision of a gloomy city. Up from space it looks like a glowing spider’s web, from the inside it is a concrete organism, inside its bowels thick human sediments move back and forth through its veins and fibres. One of them is Mr. Spider, a clerk working in a huge office, a voluntary slave, a lonely person lost in the labyrinth of streets, corridors and his own mind drenched in alcohol. However somewhere much deeper, in a place where reason disintegrates and dreams begin, a wide endless space opens radiating a fragile power…

• Screenplay Jiří Stejskal
• Director Jiří Stejskal
• Producer Tomáš Hrubý, Pavla Kubečková
• Co-producer CZECH TV

One woman, two husbands, four children, seven pigs and a herd of goats surviving on the last farm in the modern district of Kiev, defending their home and way of life in the environment of the current Ukraine.

Natasha Yurchenko used to live in a small village before developers decided to rebuild the area. Her family resisted the developments and they are now trapped between the high-rise buildings. She wants to fight for her home but conflicts surface in the family. How far will she go defending their home? A film portrait of 5 years of life of one (extra)ordinary family in the current Ukraine.

• Screenplay Jaroslav Kratochvíl
• Director Jaroslav Kratochvíl
• Producer Pavla Kubečková
• Co-producer FAMU

The documentary is a study of man-hunter in the postmodern times of constant hunting, chasing, games and trophies. The film explores the hunting passion in its Czech as well as Central European form. However, it soon leaves the realm of hunting delimited by forests and meadows, transcending to its anthropological dimension. Within this dimension, hunting is perceived as a general phenomenon concerning every one of us, related to our desire to visualize our successes by means of various trophies. These tell others who we are; or, to be more precise, who we want them to think we are. Thus the meaning of a certain activity is frequently overridden by its powerful image. The documentary introduces five personalities; five hunters representing various approaches to hunting and life in general; following their chases, be it for animals or personal goals, the film also captures the ways in which they deal with their prey in all its forms.

• Screenplay
• Director Čakányová, Hátle, Kokeš, Kohoutová,Tasovská
• Producer Tomáš Hrubý
• Co-producer CZECH TV, CENTRALA FILM, B FILM, FAMU,

Gottland is a cross-genre film based on selected parts of the international bestseller Gottland (European book of the year 2009) by Mariusz Szczygiel. 7 documentarists – students of Prague famous film school FAMU – observe the Czech history from the losers’ point of view and examine the neuralgic points of Czech and European history and so called “heroes” of the Czech nation. The name Gottland refers to a famous Czech singer Karel Gott, one of the most popular pop-music singers in the central Europe. Karel Gott himself became a symbol for the succesful, and hardworking citizen of the Czech lands, who has stayed perfectly neutral for last 60 years. He is the only real hero for the Czech nation, sometimes even reaching up to the god status.

• Screenplay Petr Hátle
• Director Petr Hátle
• Producer Tomáš Hrubý, Pavla Kubečková
• Co-producer HBO

A documentary study of the modern-day phenomenon of night life and sleeplessness. Using authentic portraits of characters living in the dark “half-world” of Prague non-stop bars, gambler houses and night clubs, we map the living space and community of people of the “eternal night”.

The film is composed of portraits of several people, for whom such premises have become a natural living space, a safety beacon of light, where one is never truly alone. Sleeplessness, the inability to endure one’s own presence and the urge to meet with similarly afflicted individuals in these “bunkers”, also often simply the love of adventures of the night, criminal surroundings and drugs. The paradox situation of prolonging sleeplessness through the consumption of methamphetamines and other stimulants, deepening the paranoia of light and the world. Creation of a subculture with its own morals and philosophy. 

 How does life in this opposite rhythm actually change a person? Sleeping during the day and living at night. The literary character of Babička in Božena Němcova’s novel said: “You should work during the day and sleep at night”, and was probably right. But who are those people that orderly citizens glimpse behind the dark glass of non-stop bars or hiding behind sunglasses in passageways? 

 When Rimbaud was running away from Verlaine into the night underbelly of Paris, he drank with sleepwalkers and hookers, he didn’t sleep and raved with insanity; and on returning home through the streets in the light of morning he knew more than before. It isn’t in vain that we tell children: be home before dark! The night cracks open the door to our fears and anxieties; it chases us into the shelter of our homes lit by the rays of light bulbs and blinking monitors. When the light is switched off, we go to sleep. And while we sleep, there are stories and actions taking place in the streets, bars and apartments that could not happen during the day. While we sleep, the subculture of nocturnal birds lives its parallel day, it wanders, speaks and waits. But lovers also don’t sleep the entire night, because the night is theirs and the new day can rob them of everything. 

• Screenplay Štěpán Hulík
• Director Agnieszka Holland
• Producer Tomáš Hrubý, Pavla Kubečková
• Co-producer

Nutprodukce tuto 3 dílnou minisérii vyvinula a realizovala pro HBO. Hořící keř popisuje soudní spor mezi matkou Jana Palacha a novým normalizačním režimem o odkaz jejího syna. Zatímco společenský odpor se po Janově smrti definitivně hroutí a společnost bere přítomnost sovětských vojsk za nezměnitelný fakt, z několika odvážných jedinců se formují představitelé nové opozice.

Minisérie bude na jedné straně filmovou anatomií vzniku normalizace a bude popisovat procesy, tlaky a obavy, které tak rychle a účinně vytvořily celospolečenský normalizační proud. Na straně druhé se bude příběh věnovat několika jedincům, kteří se přes vše rozumné rozhodnou vydat proti tomuto proudu. Hořící keř je film o odkazu Jana Palacha a dopadu jeho činu na naši společnost.

BURNING BUSH, directed by the world renowned Agnieszka Holland, is a three-part retro film inspired by real events and real characters. The screenplay, written by Štěpán Hulík, deals with the alarming deed of Jan Palach, his life, the lives of his friends and family, and the beginning of normalization in Czechoslovakia after August 1968. The story begins with Palach’s burning himself to death in January 1969 and a description of the turbulent atmosphere at the time. The events get dramatic after the scandalous accusation by MP Vilém Novotný, who speaks out at a Communist party meeting in Česká Lípa and downplays Palach’s sacrifice with a nonsense about “cold fire”. The main character of the story is the reallife attorney-at-law Dagmar Burešová, who files a libel suit against Vilém Novotný on behalf of Palach’s family. The high-principled lawyer, who decided to defend her clients in a seemingly hopeless legal suit, patiently collecting evidence in their favour, will be played by Tatiana Pauhofová. JUDr. Dagmar Burešová defended prosecuted dissidents during normalization and was appointed Minister of Justice after November 1989. Between 1990 and 1992, she was Chairwomen of the Czech National Council.

• Screenplay Bohdan Bláhovec
• Director Bohdan Bláhovec
• Producer Pavla Kubečková
• Co-producer Česká televize, Studio FAMU

Businessman Michal Mertl would like to be known as an architect of success – he founded the children’s vocal quintet 5Angels and through them he is trying to conquer the heights of Czech show business. He manages his protégées with an iron fist of a sports trainer. Michal tests the girls every day, they have almost no free time. “They’re just normal twelve-year-old girls, who work.” He does all this to create an excellent commercial project, that would dominate the market with children’s pop music. And so the girls take part in yoghurt campaigns and have musicals written for them by the Czech pop-singer and songwriter Michal David.

A documentary film about life behind the curtain of a never-ending show in the stage set of the entertainment industry. 

• Screenplay Matúš Vizár
• Director Matúš Vizár
• Producer Peter Badač, Tomáš Hrubý
• Co-producer FAMU

The world is moving ever so fast and humans are claiming more and more space without
necessarily considering the consequences. ‘Pandas’ is caught in the middle of a game
where concepts of commercialism and pure voyeuristic entertainment are put side by
side with notions of animal preservation. Yet, the very same ”saviors” are tampering
with natural selection processes and altering the mind of the panda, thus creating a
hierarchy in terms of the value of life. ‘Panda is at this point existing at the mercy of
man but all of a sudden his compromising existence is altered by events beyond his
control. From that point on, a new chapter starts in the incessant struggle between man
and the rest of nature.

Film Pandas was supported by Slovak audiovisual fund.

• Screenplay Lukas Kokes, Klara Tasovska
• Director Lukas Kokes, Klara Tasovska
• Producer Tomáš Hrubý, Pavla Kubečková
• Co-producer FAMU

Just a few kilometres east from the European Union border, right between Moldova and Ukraine, lies Pridniestrovian Moldovan Republic /PMR/. Thin strip of a land on the left bank of the Nistru river with 518 000 citizens isn´t recognized by any other country. On this officially non-existing territory has never been shot a professional film.
Framed by the time of presidential election, “Fortress” focuses on a couple of characters being stuck in this geo-political gap, in between European Union and Russia, in between capitalist present and soviet past, crime and decency, decadence and hope for change.

• Screenplay Martin Máj, Karel Czech
• Director Martin Máj, Karel Czech
• Producer Peter Badač
• Co-producer FAMU

It’s always hard to become a good actor – you have to grow together with your character, recite your lines perfectly and leave your stage fright behind. But can you imagine that a lover, bad guy, hero or an anti-hero will be played by a badger? Mr. Badger has to put up with theatre performance for audience that does not quite share his interest in art: Hare, Mole, Hedgehog and Deer. Sometimes he performs for occasional visitors of the forest but they are more interested in mushroom of the forest picking and they do not appreciate his talent. Mr. Badger his his hole full of books, there are posters of famous actors on the walls and he loves to listen to the songs written by famous Czech theatre duo in 30ties but he still tries hard to be as enthusiastic as his friends when it comes to making food supplies for the winter, talking about making food supplies for the winter and making home beverage. Even though all his friends respect him and in a way like him, they can not understand him. Mr. Badger dreams about a real theatre, about a big stage and about a city…but his forest is one of the most sophisticated prisons comparable to Alcatraz, all around the forest there is a highway with cars driving incredibly fast. Every attempt to escape was unsuccessful but there are rumors about one Badger, our hero’s grandfather, who made it and came there and back again to the city. Every Badger has a right to have a dream even if it would be as weird as to become an actor. Mr. Badger is a live action puppet animation, where puppet are not animated but led in realtime. The film will be not shot in „frame-by-frame“ mode, but in realtime using the technology of animatronics. This system enables us to achieve detailed movements of face parts while we do not lose the dynamics and spontaneousness of puppeteer. The realization was supported by Czech State Fund for Support and Development of Czech Cinematography.

• Screenplay Jan Bohuslav
• Director Jan Bohuslav
• Producer Pavla Kubečková
• Co-producer FAMU

A short animated movie inspired by the life and legends of the Greenland Eskimos. Brumlik and Animuk tells a story of a small girl Animuk and her animal friends who experience different adventures and provide us an insight into the world of people inhabiting the polar region. This fairy tale story is full of situational humor and is designed especially for children but entertains also the adults. The film is a part of bigger project including a multi-issue comic book and the follow-up television serie. The realization was supported by Czech State Fund for Support and Development of Czech Cinematography.

• Screenplay Libor Pixa
• Director Libor Pixa
• Producer Pavla Kubečková
• Co-producer FAMU

26.4.2011 GRAFFITIGER has been nominated for student Oscars 2011! This witty and slightly melancholic short animated movie tells a story of a lonesome, painted graffiti-tiger that lives on walls and facades of Prague’s houses.  The city full of filthy streets and corners covered with graffiti is a savage jungle where the tiger seeks his way back to the love he lost. Both thrilling and funny the story is processed with attractive combined technology – 2D hand-lettered animation and camera shots with real actors.

• Screenplay Jaroslava Bagdasarova
• Director Jaroslava Bagdasarova
• Producer Pavla Kubečková
• Co-producer FAMU

Sorry, this entry is only available in Czech.