Supposedly, all it takes is 36 questions and you’ll fall in love with anyone. Marie (Alena Doláková), a dancer who has just turned thirty, and her boyfriend František decide to check out this scientific theory for themselves. Yet can we rely on our love for other people if we don’t even know ourselves? A supremely contemporary view of 30-something individuals trying to navigate the way ahead.
A tragicomic documentary road movie that follows the path of a law that could affect millions of lives. “The Law of Love” guarantees everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, the right to marry – and it is supported by the majority of Czechs. Who, then, is bothered by this bill that has stirred up so much passion, such atypically emotional response? What, for that matter, is the difference between marriage and registered partnerships?
The film is based on the biographical events of the Crimeans' leader, human rights activist, Soviet political prisoner and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Mustafa Jemilev. Summer of 1980. Mustafa Jemilev spends a four-year exile in Yakut village Zyryanka, where he works at an oxygen station. Every day he fills rusty tanks with oxygen and rolls them to the dock. This monotonous and exhausting work makes him resembled to the mythological Sisyphus. The events happen after 300-days hunger strike, which made him known all around the globe.
A hole gapes in a house wall. A small flaw, something imperfect that we seldom consciously direct our attention to. Filmmaker Ondřej Vavrečka finds holes in every corner. His focus is on the imperfections of human existence. A hole can also mean an uncertain future, or an empty stomach. The gap that partners leave behind after a breakup. Ondřej Vavrečka does not only deal with visible holes. He looks at the incomplete from a philosophical perspective. He also lets a nuclear physicist, a theologian and an ethnologist have their say. He underscores their thoughts and theses with absurd everyday scenes: a woman with a chair on her head or an invisible skier. These scenes combine with interviews, sounds and stop-motion sequences to create a playful collage.
A man follows a group of workers coming for daywork in an industrial area. Soon, he’s stripped from his clothes and identity, dressed in a military uniform and armed. His determination not to fall behind the others is then tested by a series of unsettling events.
Zdena, a woman in her mid-fifties, lives in a small Czech village near the Slovakian border. Her quiet life is disrupted when her son, Lukáš, returns home from abroad, claiming to have found success on the Canary Islands. Lukáš’s return is prompted by a peculiar request from Zdena’s elderly mother, Věra, who, nearing the end of her life, asks for a visit from Czech pop singer Helena Vondráčková. This request triggers events that expose Lukáš’s secret life as a drag queen, testing family bonds and challenging the social norms of their rural environment.
