This is the story of a woodcutter in Bohemia during a war between Austria and Turkey. Wandering in the forest he finds a golden fern, whose seed turns into a beautiful young woman; and they fall in love. After a village feast in which he gets drunk, he unintentionally ends up signing up for the Army. The fairy gives him a shirt to wear and asks him to swear he will never part with it. At the front, he falls in love with the the colonel's daughter, a cold beauty, who asks him to perform various feats to get her to respond to his courting (bring her the horse of the grand-vizier, then the necklace of the grand-vizier's wife and finally a nightingale). In performing these feats, he proves invulnerable to bullets, swords and other calamities - protected by the fairy's shirt. Before performing the last feat, however, the colonel's daughter asks him to throw away his ugly shirt, which he does. He returns, wounded and disguised in Turkish clothes he donned to escape from the enemy camp. He gets arrested as a spy and is condemned to death by a thousand lashes. His comrades, who are assigned to throw his body into the river, discover he's still alive and let him go. Returning to his village, he can't find Sylvana (the fairy of the golden fern) and the film ends with him wandering in the forest shouting her name.

DVD-R is in Czech with switchable English and Spanish subtitles.  Approx. 106 mins. See film sample for audio and video quality!