Olga Čechová

A look at the legendary Czech sound designer and his profession. Editor and documentary filmmaker Adéla Špaljová has her father Ivo Špalj talk about his life, career, and working methods. Over the course of his long life, sound designer Ivo Špalj (*1940) has collaborated on hundreds of films and become a mentor for at least one generation of men and women behind the mixing board. This gentle documentary also shows “Engi” (as he is known to his colleagues) again working with Jan Švankmajer, whose films he has lent their typical, dense, and sophisticated sound mix.

When a childless couple learn that they cannot have children, it causes great distress. To ease his wife's pain, the man finds a piece of root in the backyard and chops it and varnishes it into the shape of a child. However the woman takes the root as her baby and starts to pretend that it is real.

Life is going on, people work and have children, out of love or out of lack of other motivation in life. As there is no God, the only certitude is 24 hours open Tesco hypermarket. 40 years ago, Apollo 11 landed on the the surface of the Moon. Next destination is Mars. No human project can go on without a hope of being completed in a reasonable time-limit. Maximal reasonable time-limit is the duration of a human life. What does fit into it? Béla, a retired Hungarian bio-molecular scientist is waiting for death. In the meantime, he has some things to say.

A nurse and her surgeon-lover are part of a resistance movement in 1940s Czechoslovakia. When they are discovered, her lover flees and she must find a place to hide. A patient whose life she saved, a man from a remote mountain village where time stopped 150 years ago, agrees to hide her as his wife.