Sláma's touching film explores the search for affection and the plight of those who long for love but are somehow too afraid to seek it out or give in to it.  Leaving behind a promising career and a lover in Prague, a young teacher escapes to the countryside to work in a village school.  His own difficulties in accepting his sexual identity as a gay man are reinforced by the conservative social climate of the small community.  He befriends a local widow who soon wants to take the relationship further.  But the teacher, unable to tell the truth about himself, secretly covets the woman's 17-year-old son.  When his former lover suddenly shows up, he is finally forced to confront himself.  With an effortless naturalism, Sláma artfully tells a story about the unfulfilled love, sexual identity and the ironies of human existence.

Selected Filmography: Wild Bees (01), Something Like Happiness (05).

A drama company from Prague arrives in Krakow to present a stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" at the city's alternative theater festival. The production is to be staged in an unusual venue: the local steelworks.  During rehearsals, the drama on stage spills over into the lives of the actors.  Dostoyevsky's themes of faith, immortality, and salvation cross borders as the film moves between its alternating perspectives.  Focusing on the trial scenes, this provocative film examines the subject of patricide and the complicity of the three younger Karamozovs and Smerdyakov. Hailed as the Czech film of the year, Karamazovs is this year's Czech submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Filmography: Happy End (96), Buttoners (97), Year of the Devil (02), Wrong Side Up (05).