Cinema of the Czech Republic

Cinema of the Czech Republic
Kino Světozor in Prague
No. of screens	668 (2011)
• Per capita	6.9 per 100,000 (2011)
Main distributors	Bontonfilm 34.0% Falcon 31.0% Warner Bros. 14.0%
Produced feature films (2011)
Fictional	23 (51.1%)
Animated	2 (4.4%)
Documentary	20 (44.4%)
Number of admissions (2011)
Total	10,789,760
• Per capita	1.06 (2012)
National films	3,077,585 (28.5%)
Gross box office (2011)
Total	CZK 1.21 billion
National films	CZK 301 million (24.9%)

Czech cinema is the name for cinematography of Czech Republic, as well as the Czech cinematography while it was a part of other countries.

Three Czech/Czechoslovak movies that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film were The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze) by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos in 1965, Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky) by Jiří Menzel in 1967 and Kolya (Kolja) by Jan Svěrák in 1996. Several others were nominated.

The most viewed Czech film ever is Proud Princess from 1952. It was seen by 8,222,695 people. The film also won a prize for a child film at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Marketa Lazarová was voted the all-time best Czech movie in a prestigious 1998 poll of Czech film critics and publicists.

The first Czech film director and cinematographer was Jan Kříženecký, who since the second half of the 1890s filmed short documentaries called "Newsreels". The first permanent cinema house was founded by Viktor Ponrepo in 1907 in Prague. Sound was first used in Czechoslovakia in the film Když struny lkají (1930). Then the Czech movie industry experienced a boom period which lasted until World War II. Barrandov Studios were launched in 1933, it is the largest film studio in the country and one of the largest in Europe. At present the studios are often called the "European Hollywood" or "Hollywood of the East" due to increasing interest of western productions.