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Helena Třeštíková and Jakub Hejna explain the challenge of working with archive materials.

The career of two-time Oscar-winner Miloš Forman is told by Helena Třeštíková (herself a storied Czech filmmaker) and Jakub Hejna (her long-time editor) in their new documentary Forman Vs. Forman. They eschew talking heads and utilize archive footage to allow the Czech-born Forman to tell the story of his career in his own words.

It was a career that ranged from Czech New Wave masterpiece The Fireman’s Ball in 1967 to Oscar-winners One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, and later The People Vs. Larry Flynt...

For all his work promoting unknown filmmakers, it’s still a rare sight to spot the Karlovy Vary fest artistic director donning a T-shirt bearing a movie’s logo to introduce it at a screening. But the bold, blocky red letters of his “King Skate” casual wear seemed to suit Karel Och well during a late-night screening of Simon Safranek’s new docu about communist-era Czech skate punks.

The world premiere of the film, produced by Katerina Cerna of Prague’s Negativ, saw the heroes of the story — at least those surviving — take to the stage with their battered boards as crowds cheered in the Grand Hall of the Hotel Thermal.

In researching the project, says Safranek, “I just realized that the stories, the memories, are beautiful.”

The Prague-based journalist and DJ was inspired to produce his first feature-length theatrical nonfiction film by a book he encountered a few years back,...

This year London’s Czech Film Festival, ‘Made in Prague’ celebrated its 15th edition (10-27 November). The theme for 2011 was ‘Film and Literature’, and included hard-to-find retro delights such as the 1959 adaptation of Jaroslav Hašek’s comic novel, The Good Soldier Švejk, and Czech New Wave classics like Jiří Menzel’s Capricious Summer (1967), adapted from a novel by Vladislav Vančura. More recent productions included A Walk Worthwhile (2009), directed by Miloš Forman and his son Petr Forman, based on a jazz opera by Suchý and Šlitr, and Of Parents and Children (2008), an adaptation of a novel by prize-winning contemporary writer Emil Hakl.

Czech New Wave director Juraj Herz attended the festival to present his famously dark The Cremator (1968), as well as his most recent film, Habermann (2010). Based on a story by Josef Urban, it joins an increasingly long list of films examining the mass deportation of Germans from Czechoslovakia following World War II.