Three films set in Prague, across three centuries — a family, a hidden world, and the secret that time is the only real magic.
Beneath Prague's streets, three centuries fold into each other. A Holy Roman Emperor's court still convenes. A bargained spell from 1620 binds a sorceress to her wound. A 1942 Gestapo operation runs in a building that, today, is a museum. A family at the corner of Letná thinks they live in only one of these worlds.
The Fortune Teller of the Golden Lane is a trilogy of feature films set across Prague's overlapping eras, told as the story of three siblings — Sophia, Vivi, and Nick — and a mother whose name is also a title. The hidden world is bureaucratic, not whimsical: a Conclave of seventy-eight practitioners mapped to the Tarot, three Watches of Lost Time containing the Philosopher's Stone, a numbered order of keepers, marionettes who bond to the people they protect. Magic in this Prague has rules, costs, and contracts. The trilogy's argument is that time is the only real magic, memory is the only real weapon, and you do not beat death — you decide what to give it.
A fractured fairytale, a ghost procedural, an elegy. Each film stands alone; together they form a single inquiry into Prague, memory, and the cost of refusing death.
A magician father vanishes after refusing a tyrant's bargain. Three children cross a hidden hourglass into an older Prague and discover their fate has already been written in a deck of cards they have been holding all along. The world establishes its rules — the Conclave, the Watches, the marionettes, the binding spell that will power every choice across the trilogy.
A bereaved mother chases her three lost children backward into a haunted, 1942-occupied Prague while the marionette who once protected them sells his strings — and theirs — to an ancient sorceress in exchange for becoming real. The trilogy's middle film steps decisively darker. Death enters as a person. The Stone changes hands.
Three grown siblings — keepers of a fractured Philosopher's Stone hidden in their own blood — must finally choose what to give up so that Prague, time itself, and the people they love survive the Collector's final attempt to swallow history whole. The closer's argument: remember you must die means remember you must choose.
Memento mori. Vita cum morte vivit.
Around the three features lives a constellation of twenty-one character shorts, a cosmology with its own laws, and an optical system built from documented mid-century European cinema glass.
Deeper into each script — synopsis, structural notes, the trilogy's emotional and thematic architecture.
The Golden Lane, the Conclave of 78, the laws of the hidden world, the Tarot of Prague, why this city.
From Madame Thebes to the Direwolf — every named figure, organized by tier and timeline.
Character shorts expanding Jan Mydlar, Franz Kafka, the Hermit, Madame Thebes, Helena Janska, and Aurelia.
The optical lineage: Kinoptik Dyaliscope from SATEC Saint-Cloud, Cooke Speed Panchro, the Solar System discipline.
Investor summary, financing framework, current status, contact for credentialed partners.
The trilogy is set where it was imagined. Every location in the script is a real address — the Café Louvre, the Klementinum, the Vltava embankment beneath Pod Bastami, the Charles Bridge at four in the morning, Apartment 22, the Hradčany walls. The hidden world the films propose is the same city, looked at slightly sideways: the alchemical wing of Rudolf II's court, the Café Slavia in 1924 and 1942 at the same time, the Orloj's sprockets, the bronze owl at the archway above the river. The films assert that Prague has always been two cities, and that the second city has rules.
The trilogy is also a family story. Sophia, Vivi, and Nick are eight, six, and four when we meet them in Cherry Revision. They are adults by the end of Memento Mori. Their mother, Lenka, is the trilogy's quiet engine — a woman who has been told for twenty years that her experiences were not real, and who, in the last scene of the first film, turns the hourglass herself. Time is what the films are about. Time is also what they are made of.