Two thank yous

Czech and Slovak film academies have chosen two boldly non-mainstream films for Oscar award nomination.

Petr Vachler's team has nominated the challenging Karamazovy (The Karamazovs) to represent the Czech Republic. An unusual adaptation of Dejvické divadlo's production, which, notwithstanding the film's attractive cast, certainly did attract as many viewers as the authors expected, beat other promising films competing for the nomination. Marhoul's war drama Tobruk seems to better meet Oscar criteria, as it represents a very skilful mastering of the genre for Czech conditions. Or an even more obvious candidate could be the ambitious Venkovský učitel (The Country Teacher) by Bohdan Sláma, the darling of festival juries. The story of unfulfilled love set in southern Bohemia recently gained an American distributor, which is a factor which often becomes important when evaluating a film's chance for success. In spite of that, the Czech film academy nominated a film which, though it is a high quality one, has a very low chance that it will get among the top five nominated foreign films.

In Slovakia, there was a scandal around the Oscar nomination in the past few days, which might end up in court. The producer of the most successful „Slovak“ film of all time, the story of Bathory, Deána Jakubisková is threatening the Slovak Film and Television Academy with a…