A group of picnickers are intercepted in the woods and directed to a celebration, where arbitrary rules govern their conduct. When one guest disappears, the party mobilises to retrieve him — not out of concern, but to preserve the integrity of the event. Made by Jan Němec at Barrandov Studios, the film uses stark visual discipline and behavioural minimalism to trace how authority takes root in shared compliance.
Jan Němec’s 1964 debut Diamonds of the Night follows two teenage boys fleeing a train to a concentration camp. With minimal dialogue and radical editing, it immerses the viewer in their physical and psychological disintegration—hunger, memory, hallucination and exhaustion rendered through stark cinematography, tactile sound design and restrained performances. Adapted from Arnošt Lustig’s autobiographical story, it avoids exposition in favour of embodied realism and surreal rupture. Its power lies in what it withholds as much as what it shows.
Pearls of the Deep (1966) is a Czechoslovak anthology film comprising five short segments, each directed by a different filmmaker — Věra Chytilová, Jan Němec, Jiří Menzel, Jaromil Jireš and Evald Schorm — and all adapted from short stories by Bohumil Hrabal. Shot in naturalistic style by Jaroslav Kučera, with sparse scores by Jan Klusák and Jiří Šust, the film resists thematic or tonal unity in favour of fidelity to Hrabal’s voice: his fascination with minor lives, unremarkable epiphanies, and the comic gravity of everyday speech. Though uneven in execution, its collective stance — against grand narrative, against didacticism, against the idea that meaning must be earned — makes it a defining work of the Czechoslovak New Wave.