Culture | Topic Archive

The 9th Fresh Film Fest opens in Prague on Wednesday celebrating new and debut films from around the world. This year’s installment of the festival features movies by British documentary maker Peter Watkins, Tom Tykwer and other Czech and international artists. The main theme of the Fresh Film Fest this year is Manipulation. Radio Prague spoke to the festival’s programme director Michal Hogenauer, and asked him what exactly this means.

The highly-respected alternative/electronic pop band Tatabojs recently reissued four of their best-known albums Futuretro, Biorytmy, Nanoalbum and Kluci kde ste? complete with additional bonus tracks, demo versions, video footage and other rarities. If you’ve never heard the band before, now’s your chance: in this edition of the Sunday Music Show we’ll be featuring material from their original releases and we’ll talk a bit about the band’s history.

Prague’s Letensky park this month sees the return of the annual two week Letní Letná festival of contemporary circus, now in it’s ninth year. The festivities kicked off on Sunday with events showcasing the best contemporary circus has to offer, from puppet shows and performances with soap bubbles in the afternoon to dazzling big top spectacles in the evening. I spoke to Jiří Sedlák, one of the festival organizers, and asked him what the original idea behind the festival was.

A great way to spend part of the upcoming weekend is being offered by the district of Prague 9: the Vibrant Nine festival, taking place at Podvíní Park. Focussing on diversity and multiculturalism, the event will allow attendees to visit 20 countries in just one day.

She was born to a Czech mother and Macedonian father. Despite this fact, she speaks fluent Czech having been raised mainly in the Czech Republic. She doesn’t sing in Czech too much, however. Please meet a singer, songwriter, an occasional fashion designer and a very nice woman – Dannie, who is JP’s guest on the Sunday Music Show.

Czech parents may well be relieved to know that, if the latest studies are anything to go by, their children are still keen readers. And what are they reading? Well, how about Psycho for Kids and Baby Punk…? Such is the rich new world of Czech children’s writing and publishing, post-1989. It’s a world where poetry, music and visual art have come to overlap with some surprising results. In reaction to four decades of censorship, just about anything goes and there is little nostalgia for the old days. The journalist Kateřina Kadlecová has taken a

Czech painter Hynek Martinec has been living in London ever since he made a breakthrough there with his painting Zuzana in Paris Studio. The hyper-realistic portrait of Hynek’s girlfriend won in 2007 the prestigious BP Young Artist Award. A native of the eastern Bohemian town Broumov, Hynek Martinec will soon rerurn to the Czech Republic. In October, the 32-year-old artist will be featured in an exhibition of contemporary British painting entitled Beyond Reality, along with Damien Hirst, Ben Johnson, Keith Tyson, and other artists. RP spoke to Hynek

Opera performances are generally not crowd pullers, but the new opera Enchantia, which premiered in January 2012 at the Prague National Theatre was sold-out in a matter of weeks. Families with children of all ages literally swarmed to the opera house eager for a glimpse of the magic land. Directed by Petr Forman, one of the twin-sons of famous Miloš Forman, and composed by Marko Ivanović, Enchantia became a phenomenon disproving the view that opera is a dead genre. Composer Marko Ivanović is JPs guest on todays One on One.

In this week’s Arts I my guest is Jana Fantová, the head of komiksfest which returns in October and the curator of an on-going exhibition at a 19th century chateau in East Bohemia. Entitled 13 Chambers of Comics, the exhibition highlights works by some of the country’s best graphic novel illustrators and artists.

This week Radio Prague’s Sunday music show profiles Jana Vérova - a young musician whose music is both raw and poetic and deeply rooted in her place of birth –the former Sudetenland. Although she has recorded just one album she regularly plays at festivals around the country and has a strong following of devoted fans.