Oscar-winning Czech director Jiri Menzel dies aged 82

Czech filmmaker Jiri Menzel, here in 2013, passed away on Saturday 5 September 2020, he was 82 years old -

Oscar-winning Czech director Jiri Menzel, who had long suffered serious health problems, has died aged 82, his wife Olga Menzelova announced on Sunday.

“Our dear Jiri, this brave of the brave.

Your body left our trivial world in our arms last night, ”she wrote on Facebook.

Figure of the Czechoslovak New Wave, carrier of freedom and protest against the communist regime, the filmmaker, born February 23, 1938, was also an actor, screenwriter and theater director.

He won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1967 for his first feature film

, a drama set against the backdrop of World War II.

Around fifteen feature films followed, generally acclaimed by critics.

From the Czechoslovak New Wave

Like Milos Forman and Vera Chytilova, Jiri Menzel was trained at the Prague Film School, from which he graduated in 1962, by the great filmmaker Otakar Vavra, who inspired the New Wave in his country.

"I am grateful to him for everything he taught me, and there is a lot," said Jiri Menzel in 2011, shortly after the 100th birthday of his teacher.

Closely Watched Trains

 was taken from a novel by Czechoslovak writer Bohumil Hrabal, which went on to become a limitless source of inspiration for Jiri Menzel.

, adapted in 1969 by the same author, was a bittersweet evocation of the lives of people marginalized by the Communist regime.

The director had shot the film in the wake of the Prague Spring, a popular protest against communism crushed by Soviet tanks in August 1968. The feature film was banned in Czechoslovakia, and could not be released in theaters until after the fall of the Communist dictatorship during the Velvet Revolution in 1989. He won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1990.

Very inspired by the writer Bohumil Hrabal

"I have always admired in Hrabal his ability to observe people and to see them as they really are, with a truly uncompromising perspective, but he loved them nonetheless," explained the filmmaker.

Among his other films based on Bohumil Hrabal's books are

(1981) and

(1984).

, released in 1985, had again been nominated for the Oscars.

After the end of communism, Jiri Menzel shot

in 1991, based on a screenplay by former dissident, playwright and ex-Czech president Vaclav Havel.

He had shot his last film inspired by Bohumil Hrabal in 2006,

.

“A good comedy should deal with serious subjects.

If you start to take serious matters too seriously you end up being ridiculous, ”he said.

Occasionally actor and writer, prolific theater director, Jiri Menzel had been made Chevalier des arts et des lettres by France.

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