The Third Prince

Two of the king’s three sons set out after a portrait of a mysterious beauty and are lost. The third brother, Jaroslav, goes out into the world to find his elder brother Jindřich and his twin Jaromír, and following their trail he learns that the ones who cursed them are Princess Milena and her identical twin sister. The fairy-tale form was unfamiliar ground for Antonín Moskalyk; Ota Hofman wrote the screenplay from a romanticised reading of the folk tale The Two Brothers. Libuše Šafránková plays both sisters and Pavel Trávníček plays Jaroslav, a pairing the Czechoslovak fairy-tale tradition always mentions together. The record dates the film 1983 while one source gives 1982, and the record’s summary treats the twins as the protagonists rather than placing the third brother at the centre.