Jan Klusak Movies

Pavel Jurácek, one of the leading lights of the Czech New Wave of the 1960s, scripted this bleak portrait of a post-apocalyptic world. After simultaneous nuclear attacks by the East and West wipe out the lion's share of the Earth's population, a band of eight women in their mid-twenties to early thirties, led by an elderly female military officer, wander the landscape of Eastern Europe searching for food, supplies, and other survivors. In time, the women discover a dilapidated hotel that has become home for a lonely old man who guards a few tattered remnants of the former civilization -- a television that no longer works, an old newspaper, and a wind-up phonograph. Starkly photographed in black-and-white, The End of August at the Hotel Ozone marked the second collaboration between Jurácek and director Jan Schmidt, who previous co-wrote and co-directed the short subject Postava K Podpírání. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

The Czechoslovakian End of a Priest was released in its country of origin as Fararuv Konec. Vlastimil Brodsky stars as a church bell-ringer with a predilection for dressing up as a priest. A couple of local atheists try to expose Brodsky by setting him up with a prostitute. The phony priest gets wind of the plan and sets fire to the barn where he is to be compromised. The fire kills a sleeping hobo, and Brodsky is accused of murder. The "priest's" end comes as he falls from the roof of the church. End of a Priest was directed by Evald Schorm, characterized by his contemporaries as "the conscience of the Czech New Wave". ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) is the young teenage girl who lives with her grandmother. She feels the first stirring of sexual awareness when a carnival parade comes to town. Eagle (Petr Kopriva) is the young man who presents her with a pair of magic earrings. Her fantasy adventures begin when she imagines she is the daughter of a bishop with a hideous visage. Her grandmother becomes a vampire. She pretends to be dead when a priest tries to rape her by swallowing one of the earrings. The line between dreams and reality is blurred in this surreal psychological fantasy. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

The ever-optimistic Amadeus (Josef Hruby) is the local postman for a small viillage who is more obsessed with flying than anything else: he is working on a contraption that will keep him airborn when he leaps off his launching pad, a nearby hill. His hopes are always dashed, along with his bones, as his contraption is not much better than a leap without it. Nevertheless, he is undaunted and the villagers soon become accustomed to dusting him off, and taking him in for repairs. That brings him into regular contact with the new town physician, a young woman who is understandably dubious about his chosen avocation, given the amount of repeated injury it inflicts. Amadeus, in the meantime, is quite taken with the doctor, and he begins to hope his flights of fancy in that direction will not also crash-land in the end. Meanwhile, the doctor has a boyfriend of sorts, and so it looks as though Amadeus' luck has to change if his interest in the doctor is to get off the ground. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi