2025

The rise and fall of the entrepreneurial Schicht family, the founders of the Soap with the Stag brand.

The film follows the fascinating story of the Schicht family, who built up a huge empire from a small soap factory producing the soap with the stag and co-founded the multinational company Unilever. How do their descendants deal with this legacy today?

The documentary film Kingdom of Soap Bubbles directed by Taťána Marková tells the story of the Soap with the Stag brand and its founders, the entrepreneurial family Schicht. You might not know the name Schicht, but in the inter-war Czechoslovakia it was equally known as Škoda, Baťa or Kolben and Daněk. The film shows the rocket rise of the Schichts from  modest beginnings in the cellar of a village house to the co-founding of multinational giant Unilever in 1929, whose products are well-known today. The founder of the Schicht company, Georg, started to make soap in the cellar in Rynoltice. His son Johann, later known as the Soap King, moved the company to Ústí nad Labem and grew it to one of the most significant companies in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Two generations of Schichts built cleaning products and food processing empire in Ústí nad Labem, which helped to develop the city and the whole region. Some of their products are still known to the public, but the name Schicht fell into oblivion. The famous Soap with the Stag is still produced, but the descendants of the family are not connected to it.

The film tells the story of the descendants of the Schicht dynasty, who are looking for their roots and building a relationship to the city in which none of them live. Nevertheless, they joined together and bought the neobaroque villa of their ancestors. The film is also about Czech and German history in the Ústí nad Labem region. It commemorates industrial development and pre-war Czech and German coexistence.

With financial support from: Czech Audiovisual Fund, Czech-German Future Fund, The Ústí Community Foundation, The Statutory City of Ústí nad Labem, Ústí nad Labem Region, Czech Literary Fund Foundation

 © Film & Sociology, Czech Television, KRUTÓN