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One of the most popular films at the recent One World festival of human rights documentaries in Prague was Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer. The story of the trial of three members of Pussy Riot for attempting to perform a protest song at a Moscow cathedral, it draws on interviews with their relatives and other members of the collective to create a vivid portrait of the controversial Russian group. Ahead of a screening I asked co-director Mike Lerner what had attracted him to the subject.

Among the guests at East Doc Platform, a parallel industry event to Prague’s One World festival of human rights documentaries, is director Stan Neumann, a man with a captivating personal history. Born in Prague, he left with his American mother for France in 1959. His father’s family had been prominent to say the least.

Entering Ryby & Chips on Myslíkova St. in downtown Prague is akin to being teleported to a fish and chip shop in the UK or Ireland, albeit one where the menu is in Czech. Over the years, others have had little success in finding a market for this kind of fast food in the Czech capital. However, Ryby & Chips co-owner Matthew Salmon believes an authentic approach will set his recently opened eatery apart. When we spoke at Ryby & Chips, I first asked Salmon about the genesis of the business.

Actor Ivan Shvedoff moved to Prague at the end of the 1990s from his native St. Petersburg. Since arriving here he has extended his filmography greatly, with roles in a number of Hollywood movies and Czech productions such as Mamas and Papas. Shvedoff is also big in Germany and Austria, where he does a lot of TV work. When he stopped by at our studios, my first question for the Russian actor was what led him to move here in the first place.

Piotrek Gawlinski unearths and scans rare and frequently stunning pictures of the Czech capital for his excellent historical photoblog Lost and Found in Prague. A Polish tour guide based in the city, Gawlinski uses his Tumblr account to draw attention to work by greats such as Josef Sudek but also provides a unique forum for pictures by unknown photographers who captured a now disappeared Prague.

In November, the Czech police’s drugs unit raided dozens of “grow shops”, businesses that sell products necessary for the cultivation of marijuana. The police justified the large-scale confiscation of goods on the grounds that a court had ruled it was illegal for the shops to offer in one place everything needed to grow the drug, from seeds to literature. This is disputed by the grow shop owners, including my guest today, Michal Otipka, who runs four in Prague. Before we got on to the legal niceties, I asked Otipka how he’d first got into the

A former Washington Post editor and reporter and NPR president, Kevin Klose headed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in the 1990s and is now back at the Prague-based station in an acting capacity. In the second half of a two-part interview, Klose discusses the perception of the US-funded broadcaster in Washington, and elsewhere the challenges facing the radio industry today and more.

Kevin Klose is serving a second term as president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, an American-funded international broadcaster based in Prague since the mid-1990s. Mr. Klose oversaw the station’s move here from Munich on the invitation of President Václav Havel, before later going on to head National Public Radio in the US for a decade. In part one of a two-part interview, he discusses RFE/RL’s search for a new identity in the post-Cold War era and its move east.

The Prague Vitruvius is an extremely useful website for anybody interested in perhaps the Czech capital’s greatest asset: its unparalleled wealth of architecture. The blog is the work of Englishman Alex Went, who has created close to 300 entries taking in both tourist sights and largely unknown gems in the suburbs. When we spoke at the Vinohrady Pavilion – designed by one of his favourite Prague architects – I asked Went what had brought him to the city in the first place.

After extremely high turnout in elections in the early 1990s, why has voter participation fallen to around the 60 percent mark in the Czech Republic? And why are young people in particular staying away from polling stations? These are questions considered at length by the sociologist Lukáš Linek, the title of whose most recent book Kam se ztratili voliči? translates as Where have the voters gone? When we spoke recently, I asked Linek what had been his main findings.