Jan Ekl

This film, chronicling the last days of Czech resistance fighter Maruska Kuderikova (played by Magda Vasaryova), is based on her diaries. Though she was tortured and eventually executed by the Nazis, her diaries indicate that she was optimistic for the humanity of her captors and did not by any means hate them. Told with simple dignity, this film makes clear why Maruska became a national hero.

It is the summer of 1945. A party of young people are enjoying the beginning of a new life to the full. For them this is the year one. One of them, law student Pavel, is more attracted to film than to law. With his eight-millimeter camera, he films everything that catches his attention. One day he captures an interesting face on film, a girl with an air of mystery. Pavel visits the girl, whose name is Helena, and meets hers and her elder energetic sister Olga. From Olga, he learns that the girls have spent the years of German occupation in a concentration camp and cannot forget the horrors they have lived through.

In 1647, the impoverished noble Václav Rynda shelters an imperial commissioner-only to learn the visitors are French agents plotting a Bohemian revolt against the Habsburgs.

The waitress Gita from the hotel "Bobí vrch" approaches her lover who has not left his wife yet and gives him an ultimatum: if he does not do all according to her wish, she will announce to the police his machinations with foreign currency.

At the funeral of his schoolmate, the nearly-fifty-year old architect Jirí Mánek (Václav Voska) meets his former close acquaintance - physician Jarmila (Blanka Bohdanová). They both are still single. Jarmila has recently returned to Prague after years of work on the frontier. Jirí leaves for a business trip. As a conservationist, he is to grant permission for an adaptation of a Baroque château to office spaces. On the road, a pretty young hitchhiker named Eva (Ida Rapaicová) stops him. Eva is Slovak and her spontaneous behavior enchants Jirí. He thus does not mind making a short detour and takes Eva all the way to the luxurious cottage of her parents. A romance develops between the two people, so different in age and temperament.