Buttoners

The film is made of six short stories, all of them set in Prague on 6 August 1995. All but one: that story takes place fifty years earlier in the Japanese city of Kokura, under rain that made flying impossible. The stories are about an old curse, infidelity, strange fixations, an unexpected miracle and a hypocritical forgiveness. Petr Zelenka's film does not tie the six pieces together but passes motifs between them; the same things look different from another angle. The humour is black and often bitter. The relation between cause and effect is the film's real toy: a small coincidence gets attached to a great catastrophe, and a great catastrophe to a small life. It took the Czech Lion for best film in 1997 and the Tiger award at Rotterdam.