Arts | All stories

In this week’s Arts, I talk to Karolína Garguláková, an independent filmmaker who, with her husband Lukáš, is producing Baťa Lives about inhabitants of neighborhoods built by the famous Baťa Shoe Company in cities around the world. Such areas, designed according to the same basic blueprint, still exist in the Netherlands, India, Brazil or Canada. It would be a mistake to think, however, the film was a history of the Baťa business empire.

This Friday sees the start of the 14th Prague Fringe one of the biggest events of the cultural season. This week I spoke to the founder of the festival Steve Gove. I began by asking him what set the Prague Fringe apart.

In this week’s Arts, our guest is the New York-based jazz pianist and composer Dan Tepfer, who has received great acclaim for his take on J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations as well as other projects. Dan Tepfer was in the Czech Republic this week for a special performance at Prague Castle as part of the American Spring.

Amanita Design is the independent Czech game design studio behind the point-and-click adventure games Machinarium and Botanicula. With beautifully hand-drawn backgrounds and richly-designed worlds, the games put players in the shoes of protagonists such as a broken little robot or a group of unusual creatures who face robotic wrongdoers and a dark parasitic force, respectively. Both titles have proven very successful. Recently, I caught up with Jakub Dvorský, and asked him not only about the games but also how he started his business.

Tempus Libri is a Czech company specialising in the production of authentic copies or ‘clones’ of rare historic manuscripts, often of immense cultural value. To date, the most significant tome the firm copied is the Vyšehrad Codex, dating back to the Romanesque period. The manuscript, made up of one hundred and eight parchment folios – 26 of which are illuminated – focusses on numerous topics, including the genealogy of Christ. The Codex also depicts the first Czech King Vratislav II and features a reference to St. Wenceslas, the patron saint of

Eight-year-old Ema notices that something is very wrong one day after her father forgets to give her a kiss before going to work. In fact, kisses are disappearing all over and previously happy families begin to fight as a result. That is the opening premise of a new children’s book called Ema a pusinkový lupič, published by Mladá fronta.

The 22nd inception of the respected Days of European Film is still two weeks away but now is the time to start thinking about tickets. This year the festival promises a number of titles, not only in Prague but also Brno and other cities. Radio Prague took the opportunity to discuss European cinema, art house theatres and more with the one of the festival’s main organisers, Zdeněk Blaha.

Václav Šilha is one of the Czech Republic’s best-known nature and wildlife photographers, whose work has been published in National Geographic Magazine and BBC Wildlife. Last year, Šilha visited and photographed on the Sandwich Islands near the “last continent”, Antarctica.

Václav Krbůšek is a well-known designer and animator behind a number of highly successful web campaigns and microsites. Most recently, he made headlines as a member of a team behind the release of an internet game called Pussy Walk, in which players guide a bumbling character (bearing a close resemblance to the country’s president) to the crown jewels.

Yellow cabs flying in the sky above New York, the Statue of Liberty holding an ice cream cone or a man hanging from a skyscraper, about to be blown away by the wind: these are just some of the “illustrated photos” of New York created by Eliška Podzimková, a young artist from the Czech Republic. To date, her Instagram account, AnimateNY, where she publishes her pictures, has attracted some 25,000 followers.