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Czech
see all genres ›Already a notable center of quality cinema in the late silent and early sound era, Czechoslovakia later saw the rise of several famous animators (notably Jirí Trnka, Jan Svankmajer and Jirí Barta) and an extraordinary flowering of talent in a 1960s New Wave (Věra Chytilová, Miloš Forman, Jaromil Jireš, Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec and others) later crushed by censorious Soviet invasion. More recently, the now-separate Czech and Slovak nations have continued to produce a mix of populist genre and exportable art-house films.
Discover Czech Films
Genres / International / European / Czech
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Johann Sebastian Bach
The rare film to enter into deep conversation with a piece of music, in this case Bach’s “Fantasia in G Minor,” Czech animator Jan Svankmajer orchestrates walls, doors and windows as Bach does the different registers of the organ. In its luminous attention to surface texture, the film resembles an abstract...Start your free trial to watch
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A Ballad About Green Wood
Split logs dance in sunlight as soon as the axe has cleared away. Czech folk music and time-lapse photography focus animistic energy upon clouds streaming across the sky, rivers raging with melted snow and the earth bursting with raw life. A mythic being born of wood and a crow flies through winter and...Start your free trial to watch
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Club of the Discarded
A warehouse full of disfigured mannequins springs to life as a streetcar rumbles by. They’re creatures of habit but the daily routine is overturned by the arrival of a new crate of punkish statues. Czech animator Jiří Barta's brilliant choreography holds a cracked mirror up to our own learned behaviors....Start your free trial to watch
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Darkness Light Darkness
A corporeal and Kafkaesque claymation from Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer. Two hands find each other in a room and begin molding themselves into a human figure. Different body parts come knocking, some more insistently than others, until the small space is stuffed with the finished man. Whether viewed as...Start your free trial to watch
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The Design
Animators and urban planners both create worlds, but Czech stop motion specialist Jiří Barta’s ingenious paper cut-out short punctures the stifling architecture of communist housing. Skilled hands blueprint an apartment tower standardized specifications. Envelopes contain the elements of each home. Family dwellings, bachelor...Start your free trial to watch
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Don Juan
A story of appetite and destruction, DON JUAN has been a staple of puppet theatre for centuries. Jan Svankmajer brings this tradition to vivid and at times uncanny life in this dynamic film adaptation. When we first see Philip and Maria, the lovers who inspire Don Juan’s wrath, they appear on the flattened plane of a stage....Start your free trial to watch
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The Garden
An unnerving fable of totalitarianism wrought in crisp black-and-white, THE GARDEN is an unusual live action effort from Czech animator Jan Svankmajer. One man brings another to his home in the country. It’s an idyllic scene except for the strange sight of several dozen people locking arms as a human fence. Svankmajer...Start your free trial to watch
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Historia Naturae
The obsessive nature of Jan Svankmajer’s animation has an encyclopedic bent in this unique panorama of natural history. The film’s six segments move up the evolutionary ladder from crustaceans to human beings, dwelling on intricate tortoiseshells, otherworldly insect appendages and the expressive eyes of...Start your free trial to watch
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Intolerance I
Phil Mulloy’s acerbic space odyssey kicks off with scientists recovering a roll of celluloid from the distant planet of Zog. The public is warned of the film, “Inevitably, our own notions of what is moral, of what is sexually decent, of what and who we are, are brought into question.” The same might be said of any of Mulloy’s...Start your free trial to watch
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The Last Trick
Jan Svankmajer’s debut film extends the madcap spirit of his Prague-based Theatre of Masks. Two magicians perform an escalating series of tricks, most of which involve strange objects entering or exiting their plaster heads. Once pried open, they resemble surrealist cabinets stuffed with grinding gears, violins and insects....Start your free trial to watch
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Mandragora
Sixteen-year-old Marek (Mirek Caslavka) leaves his dreary small-town life for the beautiful but treacherous streets of Prague, a city where everything can be had for a price. He is quickly lured by a greasy pimp into selling his body to the many tourists who flock to the city for its cathedrals, castles and tender male flesh....Start your free trial to watch
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Manly Games
A man sits down with plenty of beer to watch a game of football but the points in this game tally body count rather than goals. Jan Svankmajer’s claymation Grand Guignol keeps the crowd cheering while the man gorges on cookies. When the animated players charge the real world of the glutton’s apartment, a time-honored warning...Start your free trial to watch
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The Ossuary
Though best known for his surreal animated films, this live action short is one of Jan Svankmajer’s most disquieting visions of death and decay. The film explores the elaborate ossuary at Sedlec Monastery. On the soundtrack (unlike the alternate version with a remarkable score by Zdeněk Liška), a tour guide explains that the...Start your free trial to watch
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The Otrants Castle
Jorge Luis Borges might have delighted at this singular hybrid of mockumentary and animation, an adaption of "The Castle of Otranto" (often described as the first Gothic novel) once removed. A phony professor claims to have located the titular castle not in Italy, where the novel is set, but in...Start your free trial to watch
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The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Winner of multiple festival awards, Jiří Barta’s bold adaptation of the classic fairy tale stands comparison to expressionist landmarks like THE GOLEM and THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. In terms of visual design, his medieval village plagued by rats refers directly back to those earlier films' labyrinthine...Start your free trial to watch
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Riddles for a Candy
In Jiří Barta’s imaginative debut, a magic book poses three riddles to an anteater-like creature. His reward for answering, a wrapped piece of candy, proves elusive. Barta's animation revels in the possibilities of transformation and symbolic logic.Start your free trial to watch