Prague Talk

Director Tereza Nvotová is enjoying one of the most successful moments in her career, with her film Father having competed at the recent Venice festival – and now greatly surpassing box office expectations. Nvotová, who is 37, is from Slovakia but moved to Prague two decades ago, and also spends a lot of time in New York. Our conversation takes in the genesis of the hard-hitting Father, her intera...

David Mareček is the director general of the Czech Philharmonic, one of Czechia’s premier cultural institutions. The orchestra, launched in the 1890s with a concert conducted by Dvořák, is based at Prague’s magnificent Rudolfinum, a building that once housed the country’s parliament. And it was there that I spoke to Mr. Mareček about the selection of Jakub Hrůša as next music director – and much m...

Polls suggest outgoing Czech prime minister, Petr Fiala, is one of Europe’s least popular leaders, but does his four-year term actually deserve opprobrium? And what is outlook for potential successor Andrej Babiš when it comes to forming a new government? Or could legal issues even block Mr. Babiš’s appointment? With general elections just two weeks away I discussed those questions and more with p...

Anna Shavit is one of Czechia’s top experts on political marketing and has herself worked on campaigns for the likes of Karel Schwarzenberg and Andrej Babiš’s ANO. So how does electioneering for October’s general elections compare to previous years? And – going by her personal experience of the billionaire politician – would Mr. Babiš have any qualms about forming a government with anti-system par...

Barbora Baronová runs Wo-men, an independent publishing house based in Prague. Since 2012 the company has brought out works by such names as photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková and dancer Miřenka Čechová – and earned many admirers for its striking designs. As Baronová explains, she literally puts everything she has into Wo-men , which is a true labour of love.

Karel Kovář, who goes by the name Kovy, is one of Czechia’s biggest social media stars. He shot to fame through witty and entertainng YouTube videos over a decade ago and reached a million subscribers on the platform this year, when he was again named the country’s leading influencer. In this interview Kovář discusses a very broad range of subjects, from hosting the Czech equivalent of the Oscars...

Martha Dodd was an American spy for the Soviet Union who spent her final decades in Prague. Dodd’s colourful life, and grim end, are the subject of the book Traitor’s Odyssey by Brendan McNally, a US journalist who himself lived in the Czech capital in the 1990s. And, as he explains, McNally first heard of the story of Martha Dodd from a woman who worked for Radio Prague International in the depth...

CzechTek was a free techno music festival that drew many tens of thousands and culminated two decades ago in clashes between riot police and participants. The annual unauthorised gathering and the culture that spawned it are the subject of a new podcast by Šimon Šafránek, CzechTek: The Story of Czech Rave. I discussed the background to, and fallout of, the events of 2005 and much more with Šafráne...

Michael Tate runs Jantar Publishing, a UK-based firm that issues works in translation, frequently from Czech. Among the small publishing house’s best-selling titles are a handsome edition of the classic Kytice by Karel Jaromír Erben and, more recently, Winterberg’s Last Journey by Jaroslav Rudiš. I spoke to Tate about Jantar’s development since he founded it in 2011, but also about his own Czech r...

Writer-director Dužan Duong made a big splash at this month’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival with his debut Summer School, 2001. Dubbed the “first Czech-Viet” movie, it recreates aspects of the 34-year-old’s own childhood, much of which was spent around an outdoor market near the border with Germany. When we met recently the conversation took in the making of Duong’s breakout film, his o...

US academic Chad Bryant explores the recent history of Prague through the prism of diverse personalities in a book just launched in Czech. Prague: Belonging in the Modern City blends the stories of socialists, dissidents, Jews, Germans and Vietnamese with fascinating facts about the development of the metropolis from the late days of the Habsburg Empire to the present time. I spoke to Bryant when...

Ondřej Provazník is the writer-director of Broken Voices, a new Czech drama that is in the main competition at the ongoing Karlovy Vary International Film Festival . The powerful picture follows a 13-year-old girl as she comes under the sway of the conductor of her choir and is inspired by a scandal centred on the head of a Prague girls’ choir, who was jailed on multiple sexual abuse charges. I sp...

Derek Cummins is the co-founder of PetExpert, a pet insurance company that has helped foster major growth in that field in this country in recent years. When I spoke to the Irish-born businessman, the conversation took in pet owners’ biggest fears, how the status of canines has been changing in the dog-mad Czechia in recent years and much more.

Marcus Mucha is the great-grandson of the world-famous Czech painter, illustrator and graphic artist Alphonse Mucha. UK-born Marcus, who is in his mid 40s, is Executive Director of the Mucha Foundation, which preserves and promotes the work of the world renowned Art Nouveau pioneer. When we spoke at its recently opened Mucha Museum in the heart of Prague the conversation took in such topics as the...

Isabel Stainsby is the translator of a gripping memoir by Roma journalist Patrik Banga, which has just been launched in English under the title The True Way Out. Stainsby, who lives in Scotland, first developed an interest in the Czech language – and this country – in her teens. We discussed her work as a translator, love of Czech castles and more after the presentation of the book in Prague.

No foreigner can have had such an impact on Prague in the modern era as Serge Borenstein. Indeed in three and a half decades, the Belgian-born developer has been behind new constructions totalling a remarkable half a million square metres in and around the capital. His most notable projects have been in Karlín, a district he has almost single-handedly transformed with a series of gleaming office b...

Matt Welch was among the first wave of young Westerners who flooded into Prague in the early 1990s. Today a prominent journalist and commentator in his native US, back then he was one of the founders of Prognosis, Czechoslovakia’s first English-language newspaper. And Welch shared lots of colourful recollections of that formative period of his life from his study in New York.

Dr. Tomáš Páleníček is a leading Czech proponent of the use of psychedelics in certain kinds of psychiatric treatment. The psychiatrist and several colleagues recently appeared in a documentary named Doctor on a Trip that followed them to the Amazon rainforest, where they mapped brain activity during ceremonies centred on ayahuasca, a traditional hallucinogenic drink. I spoke to Páleníček at our P...

Jiří Pehe is one of Czechia’s best-known political scientists, regularly sharing his insights with domestic and international media. But his own story is also noteworthy. After a dramatic 1981 escape to the West, he made a new life in the US. Following the fall of communism he returned to his native country and became a close advisor to President Václav Havel. Pehe then became director of New York...

Among the many warm tributes to Jiří Bartoška, who passed away last week at 78, has been one published by Variety from journalist Steven Gaydos. The Czech actor took the reins at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 1994 and that was also the first edition for Gaydos, who subsequently watched Bartoška and his team turn a moribund event into the vibrant, internationally renowned celebrat...

Writer and artist Martina Skála grew up in Prague’s picturesque Malá Strana district before leaving for France in the mid-1980s and eventually settling in California. Skála, who studied history and set design, has also had an unusually broad range of jobs, from acting as an advisor to the female leads on The Unbearable Lightness of Being to literally dancing with horses.

Antonín Kokeš is the man behind Antonínovo pekařství, a successful chain of bakeries. The Moravian-born entrepreneur is also the owner of Albi, a company best-known for the board games that can be found in many Czech homes. We discussed both those businesses and much more at Kokeš’s latest venture, a new branch of Antonín’s Bakery due to open on May 1 in a grand building on Prague’s Náměstí Míru.

Helena Lukas, daughter of the major Czech photographer Jan Lukas, escaped to the West with her family in the mid-1960s. In New York the Lukases were part of a Czech cultural elite in exile that included such names as Jiří Voskovec, Ferdinand Peroutka and Alexander Hackenschmied. Helena Lukas is currently in Czechia preparing an exhibition of her father’s work that will open in the town of Dobrovic...

Perhaps the only time Czech rock bands have made a significant splash internationally was in the early 1990s, when groups like the Ecstasy of St. Theresa were covered in the UK music press. EOST, who made the independent charts in England, were the vanguard of a local iteration of the shoegaze genre then in vogue in London. And that scene is the subject of the new book Šeptej nahlas: Český shoegaz...

Jeffrey Martin, a pioneer in the field of 360-degree photography, has been living in Prague for a quarter of a century. Recently his company Mosaic launched a 15-terapixel open-source data set of high resolution street view imagery of the city. How is this incredibly detailed mapping carried out? And who are the many users already accessing the resource, which is free for non-commercial use? I spo...