"Actor: Vlastimil Brodský"

• Larks on a String (Skrivánci na niti) | DVD | (14/03/2011) from £11.95   |  Saving you £2.80 (27.48%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Shot in 1969 but banned by the Czech government until the fall of the Communist regime in 1990 Menzel's wry comic drama is a hymn to humanity and nonconformity. The film's principal characters are residents of a state-run junkyard / labour camp for those whose actions have been deemed 'counter-revolutionary'. On one side of the yard live the men most sent here for 're-education'. On the other side are a group of women interned for the crime of attempted defection. Separately the two groups lazily toil sorting out piles of scrap metal (one huge pile is nothing less than a veritable mountain of crucifixes and religious icons); together they flirt philosophize and occasionally sneak off behind the hillocks of slag to make love. Larks On A String is at once a stinging indictment of the repressive politics of Czechoslovakia's past and an endearing comedy and affecting love story.

• All My Good Countrymen | DVD | (23/11/2015) from £14.49   |  Saving you £-1.50 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  " Winner of both the Best Director and the Jury Prizes at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, Vojtěch Jasný's auto-biographical All My Good Countrymen is one of the wonders of the Czech New Wave - but also one of the least-known films from that miraculous era of Czech filmmaking. Completed barely before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 it was immediately banned and never shown. It's deceptively simple narrative weaves a complex tapestry around the interwoven lives and stories of a group of Moravian villagers immediately following the socialization of Czechoslovakia in 1948. Director Vojtěch Jasný, hailed ""the spiritual father of the Czech New Wave"" by Miloš Forman, fled Czecholslovakia following the completion of this film and went into exile rather than recant. A pronounced influence on later films like Edgar Reitz's Heimat and Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, Jasný's film remains a potent reminder of lives and idealism lost under totalitarianism. ""The film and the milieu it so precisely evokes are not so much nostalgic as they are powerfully remembered and irrevocably lost.... All My Good Countrymen reflects the curdled fury of a former true believer"" J. Hoberman, The Village Voice ""A work of great lyricism, humour and originality"" Gary Tooze, DVD Beaver ""Extraordinary poetic... the masterpiece of Vojtěch Jasný - father of that brilliant flowering of Czechoslovak cinema"" The New York Time s ""Jasný’s lyrical masterpiece"" Radio Praha ""A bitter-sweet, affectionate and pointed picture of a life many Czechs would have recognised. A key film from the Prague Spring"" Time Out"