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Daughter, the animated short created by Prague’s FAMU Film School student Daria Kashcheeva has been awarded the Short Film Jury Award for Animation at the annual Sundance Film Festival. It is the latest in a series of high-level awards bestowed on the film since it came out in 2019. The 33-year-old Kashcheeva, who made the picture as part of her bachelor degree at FAMU, used an innovative hand-held camera technique in the film. This, she says, gives it a documentary feel and has impressed many critics.

The annual Utah based Sundance Film Festival was created by actor and director Robert Redford and is regarded as the largest festival of independent American cinematography.

Ms Kashcheeva’s Daughter has also been nominated for this year’s Oscars and the Czech Lion Magnesia Award for the Best Student Film.

Shares of Czech anti-virus giant Avast fell by up to 9 percent in one day on the London stock exchange, following news that the company’s browser extensions may be harvesting users' data which is later sold to supply marketers, news site iHNed.cz reports. Company shares valued at around GBP 5.3 billion have fallen by a further 5 percent on both the London and Prague stock exchanges since the stock exchanges opened on Wednesday, according to iHNed.cz.

The issue was put under the spotlight after major web browsers Mozilla, Opera and Google removed Avast and AVG extensions because they were suspected of collecting user data and sending it on to Avast servers.

Avast says in its defence that users were able to unsubscribe from the data sending function and reassured that personal information including names, email addresses and contact details are not harvested.

The government’s human rights commissioner, Helena Válková, has filed a criminal complaint of defamation over an article that linked her to notorious Communist prosecutor Josef Urválek, Deník N reported. The former justice minister says that she was not involved in the harassment of dissidents, as the Info.cz website wrote. She is also demanding an apology from historian Petr Blažek, who was quoted in the piece in question.

President Miloš Zeman withdrew his nomination of Ms. Válková for the post of ombudsman after the article was published. She rejected calls to quit as human rights commissioner.

The Czech minister of foreign affairs, Tomáš Petříček, says two Czech students who are currently in the Chinese city of Wuhan will be taken back to Europe by the French authorities this week. The pair found themselves stuck in Wuhan when it was placed on lock-down in a bid to slow the spread of the coronavirus, which began there.

Mr. Petříček also said that a Czech national who is currently in Vietnam and was feared to have the respiratory infection did not in fact have it.

The foreign policy chief also said that Czech officials would remain at the country’s diplomatic missions in the region.

The coronavirus has spread across China and to 16 countries globally. Over 100 deaths had been recorded by Tuesday.