Jiří Menzel

Menzel's Czech comedies are warm about human appetite and sly about power. In Closely Watched Trains, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, a dispatcher's apprentice at a village railway station in the occupied country wants above all to lose his virginity. Capricious Summer has three middle-aged friends swimming and philosophising when a travelling circus comes to town. Larks on a String, banned for twenty years, sends bourgeois elements to be re-educated in a scrapyard.

Signature

• Adaptations of Bohumil Hrabal.
• Sex, food and small pleasures as resistance.
• Satire of Stalinism (Larks on a String).
• The Czechoslovak New Wave's gentlest comedy.