The Scotsman

Jiri Menzel

Academy Award-winning Czech film director

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Jiri Menzel, movie director. Born: 23 February 1938, Prague, Czech Republic. Died: 5 September 2020, Prague, Czech Republic. aged 82

Czech film director Jiri Menzel, whose 1966 mo vie Closely Watched Trains won the Academy Award for best foreign language film, has died aged 82.

Menzel made some 20 movies and was one of the leading film-makers of the new wave of Czechoslov­ak cinema that appeared in the 1960s.

His movies represente­d a radical departure from socialist realism, a typical communi st-era genre focusing on realistic ally depicting the struggles of the working class.

Unlike contempora­ries such as Milos Forman, Jan Nemec and Ivan Passer, Menzel did not emigrate after the 19 68 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslov­akia.

Closely Watched Trains was his first feature movie. Based on a novel by Czech author Bohumil Hrabal, it tells the story of a dispatcher’s apprentice coming of age at a small train station during the Nazi occupation in the Second World War.

His next collaborat­ion with Hrabal, Larks On A String in 1969, was another tragicomic descriptio­n of life under a totalitari­an regime, this time under communism.

The movie was immediate - ly banned by the communist authoritie­s. After the 1989 anti- communist revolution led by Vaclav Havel, it won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Internatio­nal Film Festival.

Menzel’s other adaptation­s of Hrabal’ s work include Cutting It Short (1980), The Snowdrop Festival (1984) and I Served The King Of England (2006).

His 1985 comedy My Sweet Little Village was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign film.

A graduate of Prague’ s Academy of Performing Arts in 1962, he was also known for directing plays and as an actor.

Among other awards, Menzel received the French Order of Arts and Literature.

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