Arts | All stories

Over the last ten years, Czech sculptor Cestmir Suska has become something of a hit in the US. His larger-than-life and painstakingly geometrical sculptures have been showered with awards, amongst them a prestigious Pollock-Krasner scholarship. The artist himself has twice been invited to live and work in the States, first in Utica, upstate New York, and then Vermont. Both invitations he happily accepted.

Czech-born Zuzana Brejcha is an Austrian filmmaker whose latest project "Gypsy Tears"( Romane Apsa)was screened at a Prague art cinema this week. The two-hour+ documentary was Brejcha's first outing as a director - after 25 years in editing - and she admits her project had a far greater impact on her life than she ever expected. Gypsy Tears is a complex portrait of several Romany families living in an extremely poor settlement in eastern Slovakia, where living conditions leave much to be desired.

Laco Deczi is one of the most respected trumpet players to have ever come out of former Czechoslovakia, a jazzman who got his start in 1960s Prague playing Be Bop and so-called Hard Bop. Deczi (who has lived in the US since the mid-1980s and is now in his late 60s) still routinely tours the Czech Republic and his homeland Slovakia.

One critic wrote of Marta Topferova that you could be better off not seeing what she looks like - just listening to her husky jazz vocals you might guess she's a 50-something Latin American singer-songwriter. In fact, the "tri-cultural" Marta was born here in the Czech Republic, though she has lived in the United States for most of the last two decades.

For this week's Arts, we visited the 47th Zlín Film Festival, one of the oldest movie festivals in the world that is dedicated to children and young people. This event, which once primarily showcased socialist children's cinema, has become an important festival on the world film calendar after reinventing itself since the Velvet Revolution.

In this week's Arts, we look at the annual Khamoro Roma Festival, one of the largest festivals of Roma arts and culture in Europe. For the past week the Czech capital has reverberated to sounds from as far afield as India, Portugal and the Balkans.

Jan Saudek has long been recognised as one of the Czech Republic's most successful artistic photographers, whose pictures are easily identified for the photographer's particular use of light, hand-tinting and positioning of models, often nudes, against painted or plaster studio backdrops. Anyone acquainted with US band Soul Asylum's CD Grave Dancers Union will be familiar with at least one Saudek image. Mr Saudek's work was also featured in the worldwide Absolut vodka campaign. Here, in the Czech Republic, the photographer is no less

Coming up in this week's Arts, we'll be speaking to the renowned Slovak director Juraj Jabubisko about his latest film - Bathory - described as the most expensive Central European movie ever made.

If you are looking for a place to relax on a warm summer's day then there is no better place than the Palace Gardens located on the southern slopes of Prague Castle. With their terraces, fountains, stone passageways and secluded alcoves these Baroque gardens take you to days gone by - and give you a fabulous view of the city.

Admirers of the music of Czech composer Antonin Dvorak remembered the great master this week, on May 1st, which marked 103 years since his death here in Prague. A new exhibition has just opened at the Antonin Dvorak Museum in Prague looking at the composer's relation to the Czech capital where he lived for almost 47 years.