LiberPress Cinema Award 2013

Jirí Menzel was born in Prague on 23 February 1938. As a young man he studied journalism, and then entered the Prague Film Academy. With his first full-length film, Closely Watched Trains (1966), he won an Oscar for the best foreign film in 1968. The film, which is representative of the Czech New Wave, is considered one of the masterpieces of European cinematography. He then made Capricious Summer, in which he also acted, winning first prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Later, with Larks on a String, he won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. Menzel was censored by the Czech regime until the middle of the seventies and acted in order to survive.

Then, in the eighties, he directed other films. Like Closely Watched Trains and Larks on a String, they were based on stories by his favourite writer, Bohumil Hrabal: Cutting it Short (1980), The Snowdrop Festival (1984) and My Sweet Little Village (1985), which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

His films also include Seclusion Near a Forest (1976), Those Wonderful Movie Cranks (1978), End of Old Times (1989), The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1994), Ten Minutes Older (2002) and I Served the King of England (2006), which won the FIPRESCI award (Berlin).

As an actor, he has appeared in more than sixty films. One of his last appearances was in Costa-Gavras’ film La petite apocalypse.

He is also a writer. According to Menzel, “Laughter is the best way to get to know the world. Today we have freedom of expression, but other forms of censorship have appeared, such as money. Nothing is perfect!”.