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The film Voices from El-Sayed, currently being shown in the One World festival, focuses on a Bedouin village in the Negev desert in Israel which has the highest concentration of deaf people in the world. Over the generations a unique sign language has evolved in El-Sayed, where deafness is so common it is not regarded as a handicap. The film’s director Oded Adomi Leshem told me why so many people in the village are deaf.

Unable to get permission to film there, the young Czech documentary maker Linda Jablonská took a different approach after learning that tourists are allowed to bring video cameras below a certain size into North Korea. She and her team joined an officially sanctioned Czech tour group, recording the reactions of members of the party to conditions in the tightly controlled country. Welcome to North Korea! is one of a number of Czech films being shown at One World – and indeed was directly inspired by an encounter at the festival of human rights

It wasn’t so much crying as sloganeering over spilt milk in Prague on Thursday, as thousands of farmers gathered to protest about the way the EU distributes farming subsidies. Farmers came from as far away as Lithuania to splatter milk and cereal over the pavements of Prague, angered by the low prices these goods fetched, and the way the European Union financed their production. The Czech agricultural minister responded, however, that there was nothing he could do.

If you can imagine a group of scientists in the 25th century going through the cushions of your couch, and excitedly labelling your loose change and lost socks, then you can get some idea of what has been going on in Prague Castle for over the last few months. Taking advantage of the restoration of a floor in a main hall, archaeologists sifting through the backfill have stumbled upon a hoard of items of everyday use - that are now historical treasures.

The One World festival was launched in Prague on Wednesday night with a powerful documentary called Burma VJ, highlighting the work of brave journalists who secretly film human rights abuses in the country. With foreign media banned, theirs was the only footage of the turmoil in Burma during the huge protests of 2007 that became known as the Saffron Revolution.

Ten years ago this Thursday, the Czech Republic became one of three post-communist countries that joined NATO. To commemorate the anniversary, and to debate the future of the alliance, the Czech Senate is hosting a high-profile conference entitled NATO Enlargement Ten Years On: Achievements, Challenges, Prospects.

A decade after it was launched, the One World (Jeden Svět) festival of human rights documentaries has become one of the most exciting events in Czech culture. Organisers say it has also become the biggest and most important event of its kind in Europe. One World 2009 turns the spotlight on the two decades since the fall of communism, with Václav Havel no less appearing in the festival trailer.

After years of wrangling on the issue, EU finance ministers on Tuesday agreed on a deal partly unifying VAT rates, allowing individual countries to reduce value-added sales tax on some goods and services. The move comes against the backdrop of the continuing economic crisis, which has left many businesses struggling. Soon they could be somewhat better situated to weather the downturn.

The Himalayan village of Kargyak, located in one of the most remote areas of the world, has something no other community in the area does: a Czech school. Last September, the Prague-based Surya association opened a “Sun School”, a self-sustainable building that provides basic education for up to eighty children of the Lungnag valley in the Indian state of Jammu-Kashmir. Jan Tilinger, the head of the Surya association and the school’s designer, explains how he got involved in a project on the roof of the world.

Under communism, hundreds of people died trying to escape across Czechoslovakia’s borders into the West. However, the traffic was not all one way, as in the years following the Communist takeover of 1948, Western states sent Czechoslovak agents into the country to work secretly with the small anti-communist resistance. They are the subject of a new exhibition in Prague.