Are you interested in Czech documentaries? In the next two weeks, you can spend your evenings with the best of the Czech production. Together with the Institute of Documentary Film, we invite you to watch a selection of films from the past year.

Documentary and experimental films can have many forms that are often inspired by literature and other art forms. Directors can thus become poets and tell their viewers about their themes lyrically, be it in blank verse or in a limerick. Some compose epopees, some create rambling and rebellious poems like François Villon, and some shoot austere haikus.

The summer is nowhere near over! This year, too, DAFilms presents a selection of films by young filmmakers from the Department of Documentary Film at Prague’s FAMU. What are the areas of interest of the up-and-coming generation of documentary filmmakers?

Is it possible for a documentary film to capture reality in a way that is undistorted? Is it possible to truly see reality reflected in a documentary film? Where is the boundary between documentary and fiction? In our selection focused on hybrid films, we examine the borders of fictional worlds.

Jan Ságl was a key photographer and documentarist of the Czechoslovak underground of the 1960s and 1970s. He is closely connected to the art scene which represented the counterculture.

We introduce one of the most prominent French artists of the 20th century and film director of the French New Wave. Throughout his life, Marker explored film as a medium and experimented with its form; his work reflects the technological development of cinema while merging film, new media and the internet. He was a leftist artist who voiced his provocative opinion on the current social and political events in his films. His work is imbued with the recurrent themes of time, memory and nostalgia.

Celebrate with us 15 years of Central and East European cinema under the patronage of Ex Oriente Film, an international training program for documentary professionals supporting the creative development and funding of documentary films from the region.

On April 21 to 29, the 48th edition of the Doc Alliance festival Visions du Réel will take place. For nine days, the quaint little Swiss town of Nyon will turn into world‘s main stage of documentary cinema. Let us take you to the festival streets even before they get fully veiled in their typical red colours and watch a collection of 9 competition films from last year’s mid-length section: for instance the winning film Sit and Watch, the music film Satan Satie or the intimate Resplandor. Watch Visions du Réel online on your screens until the end of this month.

Explore scientific discoveries through documentary film. This time, our film selection combines scientific research and film language, whether it is in the documentary sci-fi The Visit by Danish director Michael Madsen, French natural scientific film In the Mind of Plants or films dealing with the relationship between man and robot. See how filmmakers and scientists find common ground!

The documentaries are accessible exclusively to the Czech audience.