Arts | All stories

Prague recently saw the return of robots in Café Neu Romance, an annual festival held at the National Technical Library celebrating robots and artistic performance. I met with the festival’s founder Christian Gjørret to discuss how this year’s edition went and have him explain what it was all about.

The Aussie Film Fest opened at Prague’s Lucerna theatre on Thursday, with more days and more films in its second edition. This year, the festival is also being held in Bratislava and features a number of hits which saw premieres just recently.

Saturday, November 21, sees the return of Theatre Night in the Czech Republic. In its third year, the countrywide event promises visitors, including families with children, a magical look at how theatres are run and productions staged. For anyone attracted to the theatre stage, this is an event not to be missed.

The tropical island of Zanzibar is the setting of a beautiful new children’s book just released by Labyrint/Raketa. Called Zanzibar jako vyšitý, the book of poems and stories is the work of first-time children’s author Radka Dráčková (on maternity leave from her job in film distribution). The text is exceptional and the illustrations enchanting; they are not drawn but meticulously crafted from fabric.

You’ve probably never heard of Aldabra, an atoll in the Indian Ocean some 1,000 kilometres away from the Seychelles’ Mahé. Reportedly, the last filmmaker to shoot there was Jacques Cousteau in the 1950s. Until now. Czech-American filmmaker Steve Lichtag is bringing a unique documentary about the island in 3-D to Czech screens. For its animal inhabitants, every day on Aldabra is an adventure and sometimes a battle for survival.

An exhibition in Opava, called In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes has focussed on how, in the 20th century Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective was depicted and in some cases misrepresented or even parodied in the Czech lands. The show, covering book illustration but also theatre and film, was put together by art historian Tomáš Kolich.

Komiksfest, dedicated to taking comics and the graphic novel to broader audiences, is in its 10th year. The festival kicked off this week in Prague.

Prague’s Signal light festival has becoming massively popular and was rated one of the best festivals of its kind by the Guardian last year, when it attracted almost half-a-million visitors. The third edition was launched in the Czech capital on Thursday.

The winner of this year’s My Street Films project was announced earlier this week; we talk to Diana Tabakov about the winning entry as well as the competition’s main aims.

Contain[era] is a project bringing together the work of eight up-and-coming European artists from major cities including Prague, Rome and Berlin. Each artist’s work, installed in an actual transport container, is being rotated from city to city and put on display in outdoor locations. Overall, the project tackles expectations about the presentation and dissemination of artwork in what many increasingly refer to as the Post-Internet era.