16/12/2005

King Kong has a lot of screen enemies and needs to fight in order to survive but in the Czech and the Slovak box office it appears, he is given the perfect conditions to be a clear winner.
Peter Jackson’s blockbuster is the only adult audience feature to open in the Czech Republic between December 15 and 29 gaining a clear advantage in the battle for first place in the box office over the season’s other big hit, Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire which was released earlier in the month. Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown is scheduled for release on December 29.

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The national production has shied away from releasing too many titles in the festive period. The only Czech film to have a limited Prague release from December 29 is in fact a documentary; Source (Zdroj). Directed by Martin Marecek it focuses on the trials and tribulations of the people living around the huge petroleum pipelines in the Caucasus area of the former Soviet Union. Julius Sevcik’s Restart, a Czech-Finnish co-production about a working girl and her clubbing culture chose to premiere earlier.
The first Czech feature to premiere in 2006 will be Pavel Göbl and Roman Svejda’s Still Living (Jeste ziju s vesakem, placackou a cepici) on January 5. It is a film adapted from a theatre play by Rene Levinsky about life of ordinary people in an ordinary small railway station.

King Kong might have more of a competition in Slovakia where the other films to be released in the Christmas season are Elizabethtown, the German-Austrian co-production The Edukators by Hans Weingartner and Wim Wenders’ US-German feature Land of Plenty.