The Czech Century

Film crew on the road: Director (Jaroslav Plesl), his Producer (Simona Babcáková), and their Director of Photography (Jirí Vyorálek) and Sound Arist (Johana Svarcova). Starving artists who already have a number of films to their names, Czech Lion award-winning films, excellent reviews and have been screened at numerous festivals, but they don't have audiences. Their next collaborative effort - the Director's lifetime dream - is quickly becoming oblivion because he failed to win a grant, which means it won't be made. And so the frustrated Director and his colleagues await their chance among record-holders of curious disciplines such as crawling with a squash racket or collecting four-leaf clovers. How will the collision of these two worlds end? What will the Director's next film be about?

Libor, a former teacher, enjoys a well-paid position as a bank manager, living in a luxurious villa outside Prague. His business partners are taken into custody and the authorities have a few questions for him to answer. Rather than wait around, he decides to take off to Moravia with his wife and two children. In the process, he pretends that everything is normal, rediscovers the value of family life, meets up with a former colleague lost in provincial obscurity, and becomes the object of a manhunt. Libor is not a criminal type, merely someone who signs cheques and is drawn into a business world failing to recognise its own criminality (he doesn’t even flee the country).

The last six months of the life of Jan Palach, who self-immolated to protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush of Prague Spring.