Just before the Barbican screening of his award-winning 2016 film We Are Never Alone, director Petr Václav took some time to frame his work in a conversation that started out with questions about Czech identity, and ended on post-truth masculinity and why We Are Never Alone is, essentially, a feminist film: women have a future,…

Screened as part of London’s Made in Prague Film Festival, Petr Václav’s We Are Never Alone (2016) has a rather dramatic, soap-opera plot: a woman, whose husband is a psychotic, abusive hypochondriac, falls in love with a pimp from the local brothel, who in turn is in love with one of the prostitutes, who is herself in…

There is a joke that several nationalities in CE Europe tell about themselves, and into which almost any national group can be inserted: ‘How many Czechs does it take to change a light-bulb? Four: one to hold the bulb up to the fitting and the others to haul him back from installing it.’ This joke’s…

Described as ‘a fusion between black comedy and drama’, Olmo Omerzu’s Family Film (2015) slowly unravels the superficial layers of a near-perfect wealthy family living in Prague, which falls apart as the parents go sailing in Asia with dog Otto, leaving behind their two children, grown-up Anna and her 15-year-old brother Erik. Moving from everyday…

Marcin Wrona was a rising star of Polish cinema before his untimely death in 2015 and Demon, his final and most ambitious work, would have been his breakthrough had he lived. It’s a curious, unsettling film, made more so by parallels between the life of its director and protagonist, which will no doubt earn it…

In the modern day Czech Republic there’s still some eeriness lurking around the Bohemian mountains – dark forests, forgotten castles and buried treasure. First-time director Andy Fehu’s The Greedy Tiffany tells of a world where all the love has gone and only the internet is left. Based on the recent rise of metal detectors in…

When a creative giant dies it’s always tempting to say we’ve witnessed the passing of an era, even when the actual era has been passing, slowly, for years. So it has been with the death last month of Andrzej Wajda, still a lodestar for Polish film, but whose theatrical take on history has given way…

After a lengthy absence from the big screen, Dariusz Gajewski marks his first foray back into feature-length production with Obce Niebo (Strange Heaven, 2015) –  written, directed, and produced by the Polish cinematographer. Following a seven-year hiatus, Gajewski has successfully returned to the director’s chair to craft a film both modern and relevant, but also with a charming…

Emerging Czech director Jiří Sádek has pulled off quite a coup with his feature debut Polednice (The Noonday Witch), an ambitious blend of nightmarish folklore and contemporary psychodrama. Not only has he secured the refined household-name Ana Greislerová for the lead part, but also managed to produce a highly-polished piece of cinema to live up…