Culture | Topic Archive

The new HBO miniseries Hořící Keř, or Burning Bush, receives a gala premiere at a Prague cinema on Wednesday night and kicks off on TV screens next Sunday. Over 23 years after the fall of communism, it is, remarkably, the first film treatment of one of the most dramatic moments of modern Czech history – the self-immolation of Jan Palach in January 1969.

Don’t miss this week’s edition of the Sunday Music Show with our guest Jan Žampa, the frontman for the talented and popular alternative pop band Eddie Stoilow. He joins us for the full 30 minutes to talk about everything from his career to life in Malta, kickboxing, and a unique upcoming event with none other than former world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson.

If Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Ivana Trump were locked up together in one room, what would happen? In the world of theatre, anything is possible, and in Radka Denemarková’s “Spací vady“ (Sleeping Disorders) this is exactly what happens. David Vaughan talks to the author about her remarkable play.

The Czech National Gallery is currently hosting a highly publicized exhibit of a selection of works by the famous Czech artist from the first half of the twentieth century – František Kupka. “The road to Amorpha” traces the way the artist’s work evolved from figurative to abstract representation. Radio Prague spoke to the National Gallery’s director Vladimír Rösel and asked him how international institutions were involved in the creation of the exhibition.

The Austrian Cultural Forum in Prague has a new exhibition showcasing the work of Viennese-born photographer Gerti Deutsch. She grew up in Vienna and also resided in Paris and Salzburg, but it was in London, that she began to be taken more seriously as a professional woman. She began working as a freelance photojournalist for the then-newly founded ‘Picture Post’.

In this edition of Sunday Music Show, we’ll play a new album by the up-and-coming band Zrní. The record Soundtrack to the End of the World, which mixes electronica with pop to produce a fragile yet energetic sound, has been hailed by Czech critics as one of the best Czech albums of 2012.

Public broadcaster Czech TV this week will launch the first of several new documentary series that fall under the heading of docusoap. The format, well-known to audiences in Great Britain, for example, but less familiar here, focuses on real and personal stories as drama and entertainment. Entitled Čtyři v tom (which could be loosely translated as Four Buns in the Oven) the series was co-directed by filmmaker Linda Kallistová Jablonská (whose previous films includes a documentary about young communists and conservatives) and Zuzana Špidlová (recognised

On Monday afternoon, a popular theater, television and film actress Jiřina Jirásková passed away in her Prague home at the age 81 after a prolonged illness. Her acting career spans over sixty years and hundreds of roles.

Today, in Prague’s bookstores one can find titles in a number of world languages – English, German, Russian, French, and of course Czech. It is much harder these days, although not impossible, to find books published in Hebrew. But five hundred years ago, a little less than a century after the Gutenberg press was invented, the first Hebrew book in Central Europe, and possibly north of the Alps, was printed right here in Prague.

Umakart, who recently released their second LP after a gap of eight years, are a kind of Czech independent super group whose core consists of vocalist Jaromír Švejdík (Jaromír 99), a cartoonist and former member of Priessnitz, guitarist Dušan Neuwirth, a noted producer who’s also in Tata Bojs, and bassist Jan P. Muchow, the leader of the Ecstasy of St. Theresa and one of the country’s top composers of film scores.