While on vacation with their bickering parents, young Eva and her little brother Johnny find in a polluted lake two strange friendly sentient octopuses made of strange material that attracts electricity. They take them as pets.

The parents decided to send two twins, Honza, and Martin, on vacation to their grandfather.

Oldrich Danek, the scriptwriter for "Hic Sunt Leones", who made his debut as a director in 1960 with the officially irreproachable "Three Tons of Dust" ("Tri tuny prachu"), also turned to history - "The Nuremberg Campaign" ("Spanila jizda" - 1963) - to seek metaphors for the present. In 1967, Danek made his best film, "The Royal Blunder" ("Kralovsky omyl"), a fourteenth-century tale about the relativity of despotic power.
Historical material was by far the best medium for Frantisek Vlacil, who in 1967 completed his unique reconstruction of thirteenth-century Bohemia, "Marketa Lazarova", based on the novel by V. Vancura. Supported by the photography of B. Batka, he achieved an almost flawless recreation of a period that hovered between paganism and Christianity and filled it with authentic portraits of people from another civilization.

Based on the only extensive prose work by the surrealist painter Josef Capek, Shades of Fern most resembles the philosophical fairy tales and fables of Josef’s older brother, the legendary Czech novelist and playwright Karel Capek. Two young poachers, more boys than men, kill a gamekeeper when they are caught illegally hunting. Panicked, they retreat into a forest that grows steadily more forbidding and deadly as their fear for the future—and guilt over their action—mounts. Loosely based on hundreds of oral folk tales and legends that haunt the woods of Czechoslovakia, Vlácil’s contemporary updating artistically underscores the relationship between man and nature, crime and punishment, isolation and society, and guilt and memory.

A blue dwarf and a red dwarf get into a vicious argument. Each ultimately calls upon a matching giant to protect them, with unexpected results.

Eleven disparate adolescents, gathered for a skiing camp at an isolated winter resort, find themselves preyed upon and set against one another by their three mysterious instructors.