World premieres, Czech previews and a selection of the best films of the past year – that’s this year’s extraordinarily rich collection of new Czech and Slovak films.

The world preview of Šimon Holý’s new film Hello, Welcome, will take us to the film festival in Karlovy Vary through the story of three female friends, actresses in their thirties. What do they have to do and what price do they have to pay in order to advance their careers? Eight years after the premiere of their debut about Olga Hepnarová, the directorial tandem of Petr Kazda and Tomáš Weinreb comes up with another controversial title. In Nobody Likes Me they touch up on the topics of our rationality, sensuality and sexuality.

In the Czech preview, you will see the drama Emma and the Death’s Head about a Hungarian woman who hides a Jewish boy in the Slovak countryside during the war; the dynamic drama The Waves about one of the Czechoslovak Radio editorial staff who fought bravely for freedom in 1967 and 1968; a fragile look at a family breakdown through the eyes of a six-year-old girl, Tiny Lights; the animated comedy Living Large, about the hardships of adolescence; the fascinating documentary I’m not Everything I Want to Be about photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková; the bittersweet New Wave reminiscence Our Lovely Pig Slaughter about one rural pig-killing or the energetic time-lapse documentary The Grand Finale about an amateur music ensemble from Police nad Metují.

We will also get to the east of Slovakia in the early 1990s, when it was unclear who was a mafia man and who was an elite agent or an ordinary policeman (Cop War) or to a local garden shop destroyed by a wealthy neighbour (The Gardener’s Year).