Culture | Topic Archive

The 12th One World (Jeden Svět) festival of human rights documentaries gets underway in Prague on Wednesday evening. Over eight days it will screen 101 films from 30 states around the world, while around 100 directors and human rights advocates are expected to attend. Every year One World chooses particular issues to highlight; on the eve of the festival, its new director Hana Kulhánková told me about this year’s focus.

Prague’s Charles University recently hosted an unusual marathon which tested the capacity of various machine translating systems. The annual event is part of the Euromatrix project, which aims to establish machine translation systems for all European languages. The participants had a week to translate some 12,000 sentences from various newspapers and news sites. In the coming weeks their output will be confronted with translations done by professional „human” translators. Ruth Fraňková spoke to Ondřej Bojar from the Institute of Formal and Applied

Anna Kareninová is a leading Czech literary translator and editor who also does the subtitles for a lot of the films that appear on the country’s cinema and TV screens. Many viewers would no doubt imagine that Anna Kareninová is a nom de plume, as it is the Czech version of Anna Karenina, the heroine of the Tolstoy novel of the same name. In fact, she told me at Prague’s Café Slavia, the name was assumed, not by her but by her father, after he fled from Russia in 1917.

While all eyes were on the awarding of the Oscars in Los Angeles on Sunday, the main event in cinema in the Czech Republic came a day earlier with the awarding of the Czech Lions. This year ten Czech films competed in 13 categories. The film Protektor by director Marek Najbrt dominated, winning six awards on the night, including Best Picture.

It’s a long way from the Czech Republic to Yemen, but you can cover the distance of nearly 6,000 km between the Czech capital and the coastal city of Aden in less than an hour. All you need to do is to have a listen to the new album by the Prague-based band Al-Yaman. Entitled Insanyya, its music combines electronica and dub with Arabic acoustic instruments and folk songs.

Japanese promoters have expressed interest in bringing to Japan one of the most grandiose pieces in the history of Czech art, Alphonse Mucha’s Slav Epic. They are even offering to finance the restoration of the monumental, which consists of 20 huge canvasses. But both the city of Prague, which owns the work, and Mucha’s grandson are hesitant to let it travel so far.

The acclaimed Czech champion of photography Anna Fárová died in Prague at the age of 81 over the weekend. Ms Fárová catalogued and exhibited the works of some great Czech photographers, including Josef Sudek and František Drtikol. Despite persecution by the communist authorities Anna Fárová also launched the first ever line of books on photography in Europe.

Literature sometimes makes for some unusual connections. What, for example, could Franz Kafka possibly have in common with the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland? To find the answer we start at the busy British Council office, just a couple of streets down from Czech Radio’s headquarters. Just after World War II, the British Council here was headed by Edwin Muir, who was born in 1887 in Orkney and grew up on the tiny island of Wyre. He is one of Scotland’s best known 20th century poets, but it is also quite possible that you will have

The Czech folk singer Karel Kryl is the subject of this edition of Music Profile. His well-known debut album “Bratříčku, zavírej vrátka” was published six months after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia which crushed the Prague Spring in 1968. A year later, he emigrated to Germany. He worked for Radio Free Europe in Munich, where he died in 1994. Kryl is considered one of the most important figures of the anti-communist movement.

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.