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AFI EU Film Showcase: Don Juans

(This article expired 27.11.2014.)

On December 17 at 7:10 pm and December 22, at 3:40 pm, AFI will present an encore of DON JUANS(Donšajni), the latest film from Czech New Wave great Jiří Menzel. The film is the 2013 Oscar Selection for the Czech Republic.

About the Film:
The film is a must-see for all opera fans, as Menzel gently lampoons the opera world's eccentricities, egomania, abiding passions and wordaday realities. When a small-town opera company mounts a production of Mozart's "Don Giovanni," passions run high both on stage and behind the scenes. Overseeing the production is the acclaimed director and iveterate Don Juan, Vitek (Jan Hart), who confides to the audience that he's a great lover of sopranos; opera, not so much.

DIR: Jiří Menzel, 2013, 100 minues, in Czech with English subtitles.

For more information about the film, please visit www.donsajni.cz/en/.

Event Details:
Location: AFI Silver Theater and Cultural Center
8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, MD 20910

Tickets can be purchased at AFI’s box office or online at
www.afi.com/silver.

Photo courtesy of the Czech Center in Prague

About Jiří Menzel:    
Jiří Menzel is an award-winning director, screenwriter, actor, and theater director. He studied filmmaking at the famous Czech National Film Academy, FAMU, in Prague. He was one of the leaders of the Czech New Wave. Most notably, Menzel won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1968 for his first feature-length film Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky, 1966). With the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces in 1968, and the period of so-called ‘normalization’ that followed, he was one of the first directors to be barred from filmmaking. Menzel’s controversial film Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti, 1969) was banned by the government, but released twenty years later, in 1990, after the collapse of the communist regime. The film won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival. In 1987, his film My Sweet Little Village (Vesničko má středisková, 1985) was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film. Other renowned works include Capricious Summer (Rozmarné léto, 1968), Cutting It Short (Postřižiny, 1981) and  I Serve the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2006). Menzel is a member of the Czech Film and Television Academy, the European Film Academy and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He has received many prestigious awards, among them the French order of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and the Akira Kurosawa Prize for a lifetime’s achievement at the San Francisco Film Festival.