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This week the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague launched a new exhibition highlighting the fascinating history of the Matchbox brand – the famous die-cast toy cars. Matchbox and similar toy cars, traditionally referred to in Czech as Angličáci, have long proven popular here and there is no question the show will be a hit with families as well as collectors.

The Prague Playhouse, a successful English-language theatre company based in the Czech capital since 2003, premieres its new production of Charles Dickens’ timeless tale A Christmas Carol on Friday at Divadlo Inspirace.

Just a few days ago a Czech/Slovak/German children’s film called Modrý tygr (The Blue Tiger, released earlier this year) won the award for Best Picture at the Kinodiseea international children’s film festival in Bucharest. The film, based on a book by Tereza Horváthová, is set in a magical part of the city, focussing on a little girl and boy whose botanical garden is in danger of being demolished and can only saved by a magical tiger that the children befriend.

The International Festival of Outdoor Films has been bringing quality documentary, travel and extreme sport films to the Czech Republic and Slovakia over the last decade. In its 10th year, this year’s inception, which kicked off in Ostrava in October before travelling from town to town and city and city, is more than halfway through. In early December it is will wrap up in Prague with the winning films announced.

Part of Prague’s City Gallery, one of the city’s best-known venues, has been turned inside out, recently launching an exhibition of work not usually restricted by gallery walls. Entitled Stuck on the City, the show brings together work of top international street art and graffiti artists, names like Swoon, Zedz, the Czech Republic’s Pasta Oner and others.

A film about the breakaway region of Transnistria won the best Czech documentary award at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival 2012. The movie Fortress, by Lukáš Kokeš and Klára Tasovská, follows last year’s presidential elections which ousted Transnistria’s leader of 20 years, Igor Smirnov. At the same time, it offers an insight into the lives of ordinary people in the internationally unrecognized country located on a strip of land east of the river Dniester between Moldova and Ukraine.

Vladimíra Krčková recently performed at Life Fashion Café in Prague. She sang songs like “Once I had a secret love”, originally written for Doris Day in the 1950s. Standards like this one form the core of Krčková’s repertoire. Most pieces she performs are English-language tunes, but the singer also throws in the occasional French chanson and Spanish classics.

A new exhibition at the Rudolfinum Gallery in Prague presents the work of 12 contemporary British artists. Entitled Beyond Reality: British Painting Today, the exhibit questions the ways of viewing reality in today’s art and reflects two particular trends: the influence of photorealism and references to 19th century academic painting. The exhibition features, among others, the authors Ben Johnson, Keith Tyson, Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers as well as Czech-born, London-based artist Hynek Martinec.

Three theatre groups from Prague, Budapest and London joined forces last year to create a multidisciplinary project called home:scape. Combining interviews, blog entries and a multimedia theatre performance the creators looked at the theme of home, trying to find out what defines that ambiguous concept for different people – those who had lived in one place their whole lives, and those who are in constant flux. I asked Jonathan Kennedy, the executive director of one of the theatre troupes - Tara Arts in London –how the idea for the project came

A new festival called Proudy 2012 (or Currents 2012) organised by students for students (or generally anyone up to the age of 30 or so) kicks off later this month. The highly ambitious project, bringing together numerous schools from ČVUT to Charles University as well as the private sector, centres primarily on multimedia – an amalgam of live music, screen projections, live drawing, dance, and even silent disco, relying on a combination of technology from new apps to robotics. Entry is free and if you are interested in new media, Proudy 2012 is