Cinequest

5 Million Witnesses

The Octopuses from the Second Floor

While on vacation with their bickering parents, young Eva and her little brother Johnny find in a polluted lake two strange friendly sentient octopuses made of strange material that attracts electricity. They take them as pets.

The Fifth Horseman Is Fear

In Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, a doctor-turned-warehouse employee reluctantly agrees to treat a gravely wounded political fugitive, putting himself and everyone living in his building complex in danger.

Sugar House

In the final days of the Second World War in 1945 Frantisek Pribyl is killed during a shoot-out with the Germans. After the funeral, the widow (Jana Svandová) and her two young sons Martin and Ondra move to her deceased husband's native village at the foot of the Kralický Snezník mountains. Life in the borderlands is far from easy for the lonely woman. The village is almost deserted, food supplies are delayed; the Werwolf (Nazi guerrilla squads) are hiding in the mountains, and shooting is heard from time to time. The elder son Ondra (Michal...

The Giants

A blue dwarf and a red dwarf get into a vicious argument. Each ultimately calls upon a matching giant to protect them, with unexpected results.

Kinoautomat

Kinoautomat was the world's first interactive movie, conceived by Radúz Činčera for the Czechoslovak Pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal. At nine points during the film the action stops, and a moderator appears on stage to ask the audience to choose between two scenes; following an audience vote, the chosen scene is played.

Merry Christmas Octopus

Eva and her younger brother Johnny own two sentient octopuses made out of strange matter. Will their parents divorce and ruin Christmas? Will a scientist find a way to use their pets as fuel? Live action film with stop-motion octopuses.

Shades of Fern

Based on the only extensive prose work by the surrealist painter Josef Capek, Shades of Fern most resembles the philosophical fairy tales and fables of Josef’s older brother, the legendary Czech novelist and playwright Karel Capek. Two young poachers, more boys than men, kill a gamekeeper when they are caught illegally hunting. Panicked, they retreat into a forest that grows steadily more forbidding and deadly as their fear for the future—and guilt over their action—mounts. Loosely based on hundreds of oral folk tales and legends that haunt ...

Cesta kolem mé hlavy

Wolf's Hole

Eleven disparate adolescents, gathered for a skiing camp at an isolated winter resort, find themselves preyed upon and set against one another by their three mysterious instructors.

Měsíc s dýmkou

Transit Carlsbad

Even in the "enlightened" 60. years filmmakers like to play spies. In the grand-world environment, Luxury hotel in Karlovy Vary the sophisticated charade unfolds, in which several foreign agents interested in the famous Austrian scientist, the discoverer of the artificial protein. Endangered man fortunately never notice danger around him. His protection was entrusted to the mysterious madame Elizabeth, amongst agents famed as the ' 006, in fact, working for the State security... As a parody, perhaps the movie succeeded, but hardly convincing...

Defendant

Managers at the construction of a big hydro plant are accused of having embezzled money.

Scalpel, Please

A psychological drama exploring the notion of the doctor as a moral authority, who within the framework of their everyday work must face questions of life and death. The film is adapted from a novel by Valja Stýblová, in which the author draws upon her personal experiences as a former neurosurgeon. The protagonist of this drama is an ageing professor, based at a Prague neurological clinic, who is haunted by issues concerning his own principles and values, and also by the case of a young patient, Víťa, afflicted with an inoperable tumour.

Přízrak

A Leap In The Dark

Spring 1943: A three-member group of resistance fighters flies from a Soviet military airport into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to establish contacts with an illegal communist center in the occupied territory.

Movies by Miroslav Macháček