This exhibition turns visitors’ attention to film as an integral form of expression in contemporary art through an “improvised” screening room for watching moving pictures from a fixed place – ideally, together with other spectators and from the beginning to the end.
When we were preparing this project, we posed the following questions: How can a contemporary art gallery respond to the demands film places on both artists and spectators? How can a gallery guide spectators towards long-lasting, focused attention? Is a film screening still an exhibition, or does the gallery transform into a film club for a certain amount of time? Does the experience of watching a film in a gallery differ from watching one in a cinema? And how can the meaning of a film itself change if it is presented in such a context?
The programme of our “cinema” was developed through ongoing dialogue within the curatorial team, with a particular emphasis on a diversity subjects, languages, and artistic strategies characteristic of each of the selected films. The selection of films, thus, reflects the basic curatorial line that has been developed at PLATO over the years as well as the individual interests and approaches of the team members. The project’s title is a reference to our online publication platform Octopus Press.
22/10–3/11/2026
King Matt the First / Król Maciuś Pierwszy
Jaśmina Wójcik / Poland / 2025 / 75 min. / Polish, Czech subtitles / poetic documentary
As adults can we truly remember what it’s like to be a child? And above all, what can children teach us if we simply listen to their words? These questions were posed more than one hundred years ago by the Polish-Jewish educator, physician, and writer Janusz Korczak (the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit). His children’s book King Matt the First inspired Jaśmina Wójcik’s film, which invites us into a world free of the hierarchy and restrictions of the adult world. It takes us on a contemplative journey in which curiosity and emotion serve as the main guides and in which the senses function as essential tools for understanding. Ominously looming in the background, however, are contemporary crises: wars, pandemics, and climate catastrophes.
Screening times: 10.30 am, 12 pm, 1.30 pm, 3 pm, 4.30 pm, and Wednesdays also at 6 pm
4/11–8/11/2026
Ostrava Kamera Oko
18th edition of an international film festival dedicated to cinematography.
Held in partnership with PLATO.
10/11–6/12/2026
Dual-program
Kinetopsia / Kinetopsie (2024) and Solar Sound System (2025)
Tomáš Svoboda / Czech Republic / 30 min. and 25 min. / Czech, English subtitles / experimental live-action films
These two medium-length experimental films from Tomáš Svoboda, an intermedia artist and teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, engage in tongue-in-cheek explorations of the nature and impacts of the social and political dynamics of the 1990s in Czechia. Kinetopsia takes a voyeuristic look at Ivan Jonák, the infamous Prague businessman and underworld figure, and the fate of his nightclub Discoland Sylvie. Solar Sound System is a reflection of the documentary genre, presenting a made-up series of events as if it were a serious documentary. The question of what could have happened if the violent police raid on CzechTek in 2005 led to a radical transformation of Czech society is an ironic one, bordering on utopia.
Screening times: 10.30 am, 12 pm, 1.30 pm, 3 pm, 4.30 pm, and Wednesdays also at 6 pm
8/12/2026–3/1/2027
Do You Keep a Lion at Home? / Máte doma lva?
Pavel Hobl / Czechoslovakia / 1963 / 76 min. / Czech / children’s film, live action, adventure
When two boys take a trip through Prague, the city transforms into a space where everyday reality intertwines with fantasy. The 1963 feature-length debut of director Pavel Hobl, Do You Keep a Lion at Home?, is a playful modern fairy tale that combines the child’s imagination with the experimental poetics of the New Wave. The mosaic-like narrative is a celebration of the rich inner world of children, which is not bounded by adult ideas about what reality looks like. This film, one of the most original Czech productions of the 1960s, is nearly forgotten today.
Screening times: 10.30 am, 12.30 pm, 2.30 pm, 4.30 pm, Wednesdays also at 6.30 pm
5/1–7/2/2027
Dual-program
The New Inflation
Liv Schulman / Argentina / 2021 / 63 min. / English, Czech subtitles / satirical performance
Shot with non-professional actors in Omaha, Nebraska, The New Inflation draws on Schulman’s experience of Argentine inflation—a market yet deeply emotional phenomenon, a national obsession reflecting the country's turbulent economic relationship with the United States. The delirious inflation of monologues composed of jargonized, often illogical language operates like the manifesto-style dialogues of New Wave cinema, exposing the economy as a collective fiction.
El Brujo
Louidgi Beltrame / Peru, France / 2016 / 11 min. 27 sec. / performative-cinematographic video
In El Brujo, two physical journeys—that of Peruvian healer José Levis Picón Saguma and iconic French New Wave actor Jean-Pierre Léaud—connect through the medium of film. The shaman’s stride re-enacts Léaud's famous childhood scene from François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), fusing the geometric lines of the Peruvian archaeological site with Léaud's subsequent mundane, yet fundamentally performative walk through Paris as an older man.. Both trajectories become fused, dissolving time, space, and identity.
Louidgi Beltrame’s El Brujo (2016) and Liv Schulman’s The New Inflation (2021) question the transformative agency of cinema, asking if the medium can transfer energy across different borders.
Screening start times: 10.30 am, 12 pm, 1.30 pm, 3 pm, 4.30 pm, and Wednesdays also at 6 pm
9/2–28/2/2027
Landscape Depressions
Janis Rafa / Netherlands / 2023 / 26 min. / Greek, Czech subtitles / live-action fiction film
The seemingly natural landscape in which the film is set is in reality the product of major human intervention: the construction of a reservoir. In the film Landscape Depressions people fall into a deep, undisturbed sleep, making them passive, while animals take over space and the landscape. The title of this film by a Greek artist is a play on a geological term indicating an area lying below its surroundings that creates a certain type of natural lake.
Screening times: 10.30 am, 11.30 am, 12.30 pm, 1.30 pm, 2.30 pm, 3.30 pm, 4.30 pm, and on Wednesdays also at 5.30 pm and 6.30 pm.