
Jiří Menzel
Actor · 1938 – 2020 · Prague, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]
Jiří Menzel (Czech: [ˈjɪr̝iː ˈmɛntsl̩] was a Czech film director, theatre director, actor, and screenwriter. His films often combine a humanistic view of the world with sarcasm and provocative cinematography. Some of these films are adapted from works by Czech writers such as Bohumil Hrabal and Vladislav Vančura. Menzel, a member of the Czech New Wave, became internationally famous in 1967, when his first feature film, Closely Watched Trains, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. His controversial film Larks on a String was filmed in 1969, but was initially banned by the Czechoslovakian government. It was finally released in 1990 after the fall of the Communist regime. The film won the Golden Bear at the 40th Berlin International Film Festival. Menzel was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film again in 1986 with his dark comedy My Sweet Little Village. In 1987, he was a member of the jury at the 37th Berlin International Film Festival. In 1989 he was a member of the jury at the 16th Moscow International Film Festival. In 1995 he was a member of the jury at the 19th Moscow International Film Festival. He would be conferred with IIFA Lifetime Achievement Award in November 2013.
Movies23
Movie7.3ComedyDramaTwo teenage girls embark on a series of destructive pranks in which they consume and destroy the world around them.
Movie5.6ComedySlacker Maurice Fadinar wasted his whole inheritance and the only way out of this situation, as it seems, to marry Helen Nonankur - daughter of a wealthy farmer. At the last meeting with his mistress in a nearby forest Fadinar's horse eats straw hat which belongs to a married lady, spending time in the company of young and hot Lieutenant Emil. Emil literally puts a knife to Maurice throat - or the lady will get back the exact same hat immediately, or he will arrange such a scandal that no wedding will not happen ...
Movie7.0DramaThe main character of the story which takes place in the twenties in Budapest is the poet Dr. Rácz György, who returns after ten years of absence. In a café he meets his former friend Lajos, who has just broken up with his lover, Márta, because of the wife of professor Büchler. The transiently formed, rootless Rácz gets entangled into the sophisticated, complicated love affairs of bored or tired ladies.
Movie7.8HorrorDramaIn 1930s Prague, a Czech cremator who firmly believes cremation relieves one from earthly suffering is drawn inexorably to Nazism.
Movie5.9DramaIn 1947 Prague, Holocaust survivor Dita lives in a hostel for orphans, acting as a protective mentor to a younger girl while failing to fix her own shattered life. Unable to form lasting bonds or find a place in a society that has moved on, she drifts through emotional isolation.
Dita Saxová
1968 · 10 votes
Movie7.2ComedyDramaAt a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Oblivious to the war and the resistance that surrounds him, this young man embarks on a journey of sexual awakening and self-discovery, encountering a universe of frustration, eroticism, and adventure within his sleepy backwater depot.
Movie6.4ComedyRomanceMiddle-aged Antonin and his friends, the major, now retired, and the canon, are in the river, swimming and philosophizing. Then it starts to rain. It just seems to be that sort of summer. Antonin runs the swimming bath with his portly wife Katherine... A man appears with his horse-drawn caravan. He lays a striped pole across the river and walks over. With a handstand and a magic trick, Ernie the Conjuror invites everyone to that evening's performance... Ernie is a tightrope walker of only modest skill, but with a slim and beautiful assistant, Anna. Antonin speaks to her. The two spend the night in the change room by the river, Antonin massaging her feet all night long. Katherine decides to move into the caravan with Ernie. But now the major and even the canon sense Anna's attractiveness...
Movie7.4ComedyDramaThe time is 1945-46. 10 year old Eda and his friend Tonda live in a small village outside Prague. In school, their class is so wild and indisciplined that their teacher quits and is replaced by the militant Igor Hnidzo. He is very strict – but also very fair. His weakness though, is his interest in young women.
Movie5.5HorrorScience FictionA doctor is shocked when his beloved colleague Mima signs a contract with foreign car manufacturer Ferat, in order to work for them as a rally-driver. A scientist convinces him that human blood is being used as fuel for Mima's ever winning car, but does that really work?
Movie6.9DramaRomanceIn post-WWII Communist Czechoslovakia, several characters considered bourgeois are sentenced to work in a junkyard for rehabilitation. Among them is a young man who pines for a female convict.
Movie5.5DramaComedy80-year-old Ali Ungar comes across a book by a former SS officer describing his wartime activities in Slovakia. He realises his parents were executed by him. He sets out to take revenge but finds instead his 70-year-old son, Georg, a retired teacher. Georg, who had avoided his father all his life, decides to find out more about him and offers Ali to be his interpreter.
Movie6.9ComedyScience FictionTwo aliens stir up trouble on Earth in order to study humans. Misunderstandings ensue.
Movie5.2ComedyHistoryOperation Danube was the cover name for the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968. The fleet of Polish tanks which arrive to liberate their neighbor, ostensibly threatened by a counter-revolution, includes the old tank nicknamed Ladybird, which is the last to leave the barracks.
Movie5.4DramaMichal's father and his friends are stigmatized by their war experience and the post-war social deformations in which they took part either directly, or watched them cowardly and in silence. They are trying to repress their feelings of guilt and justify their behavior to the young generation with memories of their heroic war feats. Michal, however, does not want to have anything to do with their problems. He subconsciously perceives the unpleasant atmosphere in the family as well as his father's hypocrisy. After one of many quarrels with his father, he runs away from home, determined to go his own way.
Movie7.0DramaStephen, living in a troubled family, breaks into a grocery store and wreaks vandalism. He is sent to a reform school. Later he works in a cleaning brigade and accidentally meets József Draskóczi, who denounced him. Draskóczi lives in an unloving, troubled atmosphere with his barren daughter and cynical son-in-law, ascetic about his youthful communist beliefs. He feels responsible for Istvan's fate, offering him a human voice and love. Despite his daughter's hysterical jealousy, he sends Istvan to school and then, through his previous connections, provides him with an apartment...
Minden szerdán
1979 · 1 votes
Movie5.9DramaEngineer Jan Sebek (Jan Kacer) is undergoing treatment in a mental home after his unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide. His therapist, via discussions both with the patient and with people who know him, tries to find out what made the young and seemingly satisfied man decide to end his own life. Jan's pretty wife Jana (Jana Brejchová) claims not to know about anything but she is conducting an affair with a family friend, almost publicly and with the blessing of her parents.
Movie5.8DocumentaryDocumentary feature about Czech director Jiří Menzel, featuring Menzel himself as well as Miloš Forman, Emir Kusturica, István Szabó and others.
To Make a Comedy Is No Fun
2016 · 4 votes
Movie7.0DocumentaryThis film is a documentary-style look at the life of the beloved Czech actor, Zdeněk Svěrák.
Movie4.6ComedyMusicA musical starring Jiří Menzel (whose part is sung by Achilles Michailidis) as a math and physics teacher employing innovative teaching methods.
Movie7.2DramaComedyTold from the perspective of man reflecting on his childhood in Prague in the early years of World War II and the eventual destruction of his family as the Nazis rise to power. The storyline focuses heavily on Jewish-Czech Silberstein family members. Drama was filmed on the real events as a tribute to Mr. Nicholas Winton, the British humanitarian who organized the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War in an operation later known as the Czech Kindertransport from German-occupied Czechoslovakia and likely death in the Holocaust.
Movie5.2DramaThe general practitioner Balla and his wife abandoning her higher education begin their common life in the small mountain village in the hope of quick enrichment and return to the capital. Despite Éva and Emma, the two school mistresses longing for love and Demeter, the dove-keeper obsessed with a desire for flight life is boring in the country.
Movie6.9DramaManagers at the construction of a big hydro plant are accused of having embezzled money.
Movie8.0ComedyDramaAn elderly paper-crusher branded a fool in Prague secretly stashes condemned books, preserving their contents and extrapolating from them eccentric scenarios of wit.
Series8
TV7.3FamilyDramaSet in Czechoslovakia, the drama follows the lives of its characters against the backdrop of real historical events that shape their personal stories. To evoke period atmosphere, the series intersperses authentic clips from vintage Czechoslovak film newsreels, using their original commentaries or newly recorded historical voice-overs by Vladimír Fišer. A narrator, initially voiced by Vojtěch Kotek and later by Matěj Hádek, provides continuity and reflection, guiding viewers through changing times. Under the guidance of screenwriter Rudolf Merkner, each episode’s script weaves family and individual dramas into key moments of Czech and Slovak history: political shifts, cultural trends, and social transformations from the 1960s onward.
Vyprávěj
2009 · 7 votes
TV6.0Talk ShowKrásný ztráty
2000 · 4 votes
TV7.0ComedyHospoda is a Czech television comedy series which premiered on TV Nova. From 1996 to 1997, 52 episodes were aired.
Hospoda
1996 · 7 votes
- TVDocumentary
Television series Golden Sixties examines new insights into Czech and Slovak cinema of the 1960s and the role of the Czechoslovak New Wave. Each episode focuses on a different filmmaker.
TV7.0DocumentaryPříběhy slavných
2000 · 1 votes
TV9.0DramaPražský písničkář
1997 · 1 votes
TVComedyTalk Show
TVDocumentaryThe miniseries explores the possibilities and ways of behavior in non-verbal communication, primarily movements, gestures and ways of expression, but also the causes and roots of their origin. The series also explores the most interesting changes in the development of different cultures, including tattooing, scarring and body painting. Series also deal with the language of deaf and blind people, different universal languages, laughter, whistling and other peripheral phenomena associated with non-verbal communication. It also answers the questions does politicians think what they say, do suspects lie to the police or the court and how their body language reveals them.