Jana Janěková

A father and son have nothing in common except a first name, Richard, and an apartment on a housing estate. The burly, good-natured, 30-something factory worker listens to heavy metal and occasionally lets his girlfriend into his life. The frail, retired teacher, who raised the boy after his mother’s departure, is the embodiment of care and understanding. However, their tranquil, shared reality, which embraces both the hardcore band Našrot and Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers,” is disrupted by the sudden death of the mother. Young Richard sets out on a peculiar initiation journey with bizarre encounters and moments of unexpected enlightenment.

Hana is a psychologist and a thoroughly independent woman. Her unemployed husband, jealous of his wife, finds a younger girlfriend, but their teenage son Honzik is frustrated; everyone ignores him. Hana's patient Eva, an attractive middle-aged woman, is having problems with her 25-year-old son; she is in love with her son's friend and her son is offended by her behavior. To complete the circle, he falls in love with Hana and Honzik is utterly disgusted by their affair. Another of Hana's patients is Dub, a millionaire who can have pretty much anything, or anyone, he wants. He wants Hana. But he can't have her.

Libor, a former teacher, enjoys a well-paid position as a bank manager, living in a luxurious villa outside Prague. His business partners are taken into custody and the authorities have a few questions for him to answer. Rather than wait around, he decides to take off to Moravia with his wife and two children. In the process, he pretends that everything is normal, rediscovers the value of family life, meets up with a former colleague lost in provincial obscurity, and becomes the object of a manhunt. Libor is not a criminal type, merely someone who signs cheques and is drawn into a business world failing to recognise its own criminality (he doesn’t even flee the country).

The Horváth family is a Romani family with seven children, and the story begins with the tragic death of the father. His wife, Vera, is suddenly in a fight with the authorities, determined to keep her large family together at all costs, but she is hopelessly ill-prepared for the task. They are evicted from their home and her case-Vera versus the city-finds its way to a young, ambitious lawyer. She doesn't know the world of the Romani, nor is she particularly interested in it. Initially she takes the case as a springboard for her career. Despite her prejudices, incomprehension and sometimes Vera herself, she doesn't abandon the case. Luckily she is not the only one who sides with the family. There is a social worker whose attempts to help the Horváths are also motivated by his entirely private interest in the attractive lawyer.

In a Czech school friendship grows between a teacher and a student. The friendship turns into an intimate relationship. Till the student begin to blackmail the teacher.

A marquee stands on a sprawling Prague housing estate and is home to two young bricklayers, who have all sorts of life experiences waiting for them in the city. Around the two rural bricklayers absorbed by the big city, the entertainment is more than a little embarrassing, toothless, revealing that at the height of normalisation, even the jolly genre of drama fared poorly, and any satirical allusions were especially undesirable. With no sense of humorous exaggeration and no wittily punctuated plots, the story unfolds, showing how the characters, living in a marquee standing on a sprawling estate, face all the pitfalls of the "big world"...