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Film: Don Juans

(This article expired 26.06.2014.)

On September 15, at 5 pm, the AFI Silver Theater and Cultural Center will screen Oscar-winning director Jiří Menzel's new film DON JUANS (Donšajni). The film unveils the world of the opera unmasked and stripped of its glamor, bringing a story of love, disillusionment and one's lifelong passion for opera singers, all served with irony and humor so typical for Menzel’s films. For the first time in his career, Menzel is the author of the original story to his film as well as of the script. Following the screening, there will be a Q&A; with the director.

The exhibition Capricious Summers of Jiří Menzel, based on photographs, posters, texts and documents from private archives of the director, will be on view at the screening.

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. 

Praha and PSJ