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Haka is a traditional Māori dance, which became world-famous thanks to the New Zealand rugby team All Blacks, who perform the dance during their pre-match ritual. It was recently performed by the Whakaari Rotorua group from New Zealand at the Prague folklore festival. Kristýna Maková met with the group’s leader, Frank Tomas Grapl Junior, who has both Māori and Czech roots. She first asked him what kind of music they brought to the Czech Republic:

Author James Stafford is a big fan of Czech culture and history and recently settled in the Czech Republic with his family. For the past seven years or so, James worked on ‘The Sorrowful Putto of Prague’ an online comic about a somewhat cynical 400-year-old putto who has seen it all in the Czech capital. The graphic novel now been published in Czech by Argo Publishers – a beautiful edition which Czech readers can look forward to snapping up. A treat, is how it was described by Samuel L. Jackson.

The Czech illustrator Miroslav Šašek produced delightful and evocative books that introduced generations of children to some of the world’s great cities and countries. The fact he spent most of his life in exile has meant that his renown is perhaps greater internationally than in his native country. But in recent years that has finally been changing.

German artist Gerhard Richter has been described as one of the greatest living painters, who left a mark both in the 20th century and continues to push boundaries with his work even now. Without exaggeration, a retrospective of Mr Richter’s work which opened recently at the National Gallery, is the cultural event of the season, a chance to see work of an artist who has oscilated between pure abstraction and photorealism.

Academia Film Olomouc is one of the longest running film festivals in the Czech Republic. What is unique is that this festival, now in its 52nd year, focusses largely on science documentary films. The Future is Now is this year’s motto and it won’t be a surprise that films being screened examine both the promises but also potential risks in fields moving rapidly forward, such as robotics, bioengineering, nanotechnology and of course the big one - artificial intelligence.

Czech Radio has just launched Zhasni!, or Turn the Lights Out!, the station’s first dedicated podcast series. The move is aimed at boosting Czech listeners’ usage of podcasts, a delivery system particularly popular in the US via which subscribers automatically receive audio files – including, of course, radio shows – on their smartphones or other devices. To find out more about this drive I spoke to Edita Kudláčová and Robert Candra from Czech Radio’s Creative Hub group. My first question: What is Zhasni! and how did it come about?

Authors Matěj Černý and Marie Peřinová, partners in real life, worked for three years on a most unusual guidebook mapping Prague’s most curious sites. Entitled 111 Places in Prague That You Shouldn’t Miss, it became a surprise bestseller and will see an English edition later this year.

A new biopic exploring aspects of the life of Jan Masaryk will be the most keenly anticipated Czech-produced film at this year’s Berlinale, which gets underway in the German capital on Thursday. A Prominent Patient depicts the famous politician and diplomat at a low point as the clouds of World War II draw near.

A new exhibition entitled ‘Fear of the Unknown’, previously shown in an earlier inception in Bratislava, opened this week at Prague’s National Technical Library, focussing on the plight of refugees and the discourse surrounding the migrant crisis. The discussion is one which has been highly-politicised and exploited not only by fringe politicians but sadly even by the political mainstream. One of the exhibition’s main aims is thus to show that hate and xenophobia are never the answer – and many of the installations make the point very effectively.

A new book, Fashion Behind the Iron Curtain, released by Olympia and Prague’s Museum of Decorative Arts (UPM) has taken on the task of mapping fashion in Czechoslovakia from 1948 – 1989, a period that followed the Second World War, the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, a brief window of democracy and freedom and itself was marked by 40 years of totalitarian rule.