Movies by František Vláčil

Concert at the End of Summer
A docudrama about four weeks in the life of famous Czech composer Antonin Dvorak. The drama - filled with many of Dvorak's compositions - begins when the composer suddenly decides to cut a concert in London and return home. While on the train, flashbacks reveal his relationship to his wife Anna and her sister Josefina. Both women gave him inspiration, yet Dvorak is clearly troubled in some way as musical excerpts come and go in his creative mind.
Cure N. 2357
A popular science film about the creation of a new drug, from the moment a chemist determines, based on the composition of a substance, that it might have medicinal effects, to the moment it finds itself in the patient's hand

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 ...

Adelheid
In the aftermath of World War II, a soldier takes charge of a manor formerly owned by a German family and falls in love with the daughter, now a maid. Their relationship forces him to confront the tension between his love and his conscience.
Sirius
In SIRIUS, a young boy whose most cherished companion is his loyal German shepherd devises his own form of resistance when the Nazis arrest his father, then order the confiscation of local canines, including his pet, to be retrained as attack dogs against the rebellious populace.

Clouds of Glass
A young boy’s infatuation with flight is the subject of Vláčil’s poetic, prize-winning early short, made for the Czechoslovak Army’s film unit.
Letter from front
Albert
Story of an extraordinary musician, violinist, who was famous, but his alcoholism led him to poverty. Now he is playing time from time to rich people. Then Albert meets count Delesov, who tries to change Albert's life. Two different characters, two ways of life confront... Will Albert change? Should he?
The Town in White
Garrison in the Peak
About meteorologists working on Lomničký štít. The film shows contrast between a man and mountains.

The Little Shepherd Boy from the Valley
In 1947 by the Beskid mountains, the traces of war still linger, destroyed tanks dispersed throughout the farmland creating an eerie backdrop. This film follows a ten-year-old boy and the strange visions he encounters, his world of fantasy exacerbated with ample time, space, and a lack of companionship or guidance. We see the adults that influence and dominate his life, for better or for worse. Surreal and packed with an excellent study of human emotions and motivations compounded by their rural, isolated vacuum of a town, this is a timeless...

Smoke on the Potato Fields
In this character study by Czech director Frantisek Vlacil, a stout middle-aged physician whose marriage has come apart establishes a practice in a small town. Gradually he's drawn into the lives of his patients—a childless couple, a pregnant girl with a stern mother, the son of a duck farmer—and each relationship reveals a bit more about him and the idyllic but insular community.
Electricity Management