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Bei seiner Premiere auf dem Karlovy Vary International Film Festival wurde Jiri Madls Drama mit dem Právo Audience Award ausgezeichnet. Nun geht es für Tschechien ins Rennen um eine Oscarnominierung in der Kategorie „Bester internationaler Film“.

„Waves“ geht für Tschechien ins Oscarrennen (Credit: Dawson Films)

Die Czech Film and Television Academy hat Jiri Madls Drama „Waves” bei der Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences für eine Nominierung in der Oscarkategorie „Bester internationaler Film“ eingereicht.

Das auf wahren Begebenheiten beruhende Drama um eine Gruppe von Mitarbeitern der internationalen Abteilung des tschechischen Radios, die während des Prager Frühlings im Jahr 1968 versucht, weiter unabhängig ihre Nachrichten zu verbreiten, feierte beim Karlovy Vary International Film Festival im Juli seine Premiere und wurde dort mit dem Právo Audience Award ausgezeichnet.

Filme aus der Tschechoslowakei/Tschechien waren bis dato neunmal in der Kategorie „Bester nicht-englischsprachiger Film“/„Bester internationaler Film“ für den Oscar nominiert und wurden...

Ari Aster’s nearly-three hour journey Beau Is Afraid, described by the filmmaker himself as a “Jewish Lord of the Rings,” will arrive a bit earlier than expected. Now set to debut on April 14 in New York and LA before expanding wide the following week, including IMAX screens, we’ve received more context for what to expect thanks to a new series the director curated for Film at Lincoln Center.

Set to run April 14-20 at the NYC venue, selections include works by Alfred Hitchcock, Jiří Menzel, Guy Maddin, Albert Brooks, Nicholas Ray, Powell and Pressburger, Tsai Ming-liang, Jacques Tati, and more. “This eclectic and unexpected collection of masterworks drawn from seven decades of film history across a range of genres and production contexts sheds light on the inspirations and influences behind one of the most compelling directorial voices in Hollywood today,” notes the press release.

Aster also recently let...

It’s hard to imagine a more well-timed and well-placed documentary than Jan Siki’s “Reconstruction of Occupation,” which debuted on Saturday, Aug. 21 at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic. The film had its world premiere 53 years to the day that Soviet tanks and military vehicles rolled into what was then Czechoslovakia, and it screened in a theater, the Kino Čas, that sits on streets that saw those military vehicles in August 1968.

Much of the footage stems from a time when the new wave of Czech films was flowering, with landmarks like Jiri Menzel’s Oscar-winning “Closely Watched Trains,” Milos Forman’s “The Fireman’s Ball” and Jan Nemec’s “A Report on the Party and the Guests.” And it came at the end of the Prague Spring, the eight-month period that began when Alexander Dubček became head of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and instituted liberal reforms...

“I wanted to tell this story because it asks so many questions on so many levels,” admits acclaimed Polish director Agnieszka Holland about why she wanted to direct her latest film, the Czech/Polish/Irish/Slovak co-production “Charlatan.” “It’s an intimate story with an epic scope,” she says. Watch our exclusive video interview with Holland above.

“Charlatan” is based on the true story of Czech healer Jan Mikolášek, who dedicated his life to treat the sick using medicinal plants. Throughout the war and turmoil of the 20th century he has to choose between his calling and his conscience. The film stars acclaimed Czech actor Ivan Trojan in a stunning performance as Mikolášek, alongside his real-life son Josef Trojan as the younger Mikolášek. The film co-stars Czech matinee idol Juraj Loj as the healer’s devoted assistant František Palko.

See 2021 Oscars shortlists in 9 categories: International Feature Film, Documentary Feature, Original Song,...

Closely Observed Trains

Last week saw the death of Czech New Wave director Jiri Menzel, whose beautifully observed romance Closely Observed Trains is sadly not available to stream in the UK at the moment. We’re looking at some other films about life on the railways that remind us how much trains have contributed to cinema.

The General

The General, BFI Player, Amazon Prime

Chases and fights on the tops of trains have long been a staple of action cinema, starting with The Great Train Robbery in 1903 and taking in the likes on Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 and James Bond thriller Skyfall, but those made after 1926 all owe something to the directing skills, stunt coordination and sheer courage of Buster Keaton. Here he plays a railway engineer whose beloved engine is stolen by enemy spies during the US Civil War – with the woman.

Oscar-winning Czech director best known for his 1966 film Closely Observed Trains

The film Closely Observed Trains, made in 1966, is a quietly subversive comedy, beautifully shot in crisp black-and-white, in which a workshy young guard at a remote train station in Czechoslovakia during the second world war is more concerned with losing his virginity than with throwing in his lot with either the occupying German forces or the resistance fighters.

It was directed with a charmingly light touch by Jiří Menzel, who has died aged 82 after a long illness. It established the simple rural milieu to which he would return repeatedly throughout his career and showed in its gently searching way that the personal can never be divorced from the political.

The Czech director’s films reflected a difficult, grisly era but were infused with an irresistible wit and romance, most memorably in Closely Observed Trains

Related: Jiri Menzel, Oscar-winning Czech film director, dies at 82

Jiří Menzel was the powerhouse film-maker of the Czech new wave, a director, screenwriter and actor who along with Věra Chytilová, Ján Kadár and Miloš Forman found a way of speaking to the Czech soul – the European soul, too – and mobilised cinema in the cause of humanity and freedom. Menzel’s movies, in their wit and subversive romance, were born of the grisly era that ran from Munich ’38 to the Prague Spring; the Czechs knew tyranny from both sides: the violence and war delirium of the Nazis and then the dead hand of Soviet rule with its chilling paranoia and humourless, clodhopping bureaucracy.

Jiri Menzel on the red carpet at Karlovy Vary with William Friedkin in 2014 Photo: Courtesy of Karlovy Vary Film Festival Oscar-winning Czech director, writer and actor Jiri Menzel died on Saturday at the age of 82.

His wife Olga posted a tribute to her husband on Instagram and Facebook yesterday, writing: "Our beloved, the bravest of all the brave. Last night, at home in our arms, your body left our earthly world. It was a great honor to be able to accompany you on your last journey."

Menzel, who won the Best Foreign Language Oscar in 1968 for his Nazi occupation romance Closely Observed Trains, was a leading figure of the Czech New Wave, with films including Larks On A String and Shortcuts.

In a directing career spanning more than 40 years, he was also Oscar nominated for My Sweet Little Village and carried on making films into the 2000s, including quirky comedy...

His first feature, Closely Watched Trains, won the best foreign language film in 1967

Oscar-winning Czech film director Jiri Menzel has died aged 82 after battling serious health problems for a long time, his wife Olga Menzelová said on Sunday.

“Our dear Jiri, the bravest of the brave. Your body left our mundane world in our arms last night,” she wrote on Facebook.

Czech director Jiri Menzel, who helmed the Oscar-winning feature Closely Watched Trains, died on Saturday after a long battle with an undisclosed illness. He was 82.

His wife, Olga confirmed his death on Instagram and Facebook. “It was our utmost honor and privilege that we could be with you on your last pilgrimage to eternity,” she wrote, translated to English. “Your love for me, and for our girls was the kind of love that never lays down conditions.”

She added, “I am also grateful to you for the last three years, as hard as they were. You kept always helping me with your courage, with your appetite and your will to live, and with your humor. I wish for you “a pretty little cloud” as you often used to say… Death cannot end anything. I believe we will meet again, in whatever way. It simply must be so because I feel it cannot be otherwise.

Jiri Menzel, director of the Oscar-winning film “Closely Watched Trains,” died this weekend at the age of 82, according to a Facebook post by his wife.

“Dearest Jirka, I thank you for each and single day I could spend with you. Each was extraordinary. I am also grateful to you for the last three years, as hard as they were,” his wife wrote in her post.

Born in Prague in 1938, Menzel became one of the most famous members of the Czech New Wave of cinema in the 1960s, earning critical acclaim in the West while struggling to get his films released in his home country due to Communist censors. Many of his films were based on the novels of Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, including “Closely Watched Trains,” a coming-of-age story about a teen who gets a job at a train station in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Menzel’s adaptation won the Oscar for...

Oscar-winning Czech director, writer and actor Jiri Menzel died Saturday following a long illness.

Menzel’s death was confirmed by his wife, Olga, who posted the news on Instagram and Facebook late Sunday. Menzel was 82.

Winner of the Academy Award for best foreign-language film for the 1966 bittersweet Nazi occupation story “Closely Watched Trains,” Menzel was a leading figure of the Czech New Wave along with boundary-breaking directors such as Milos Forman and Vera Chytilova

Also nominated for a foreign-language Oscar in 1986 for the dark comedy “My Sweet Little Village,” Menzel was celebrated for his ironic takes on life, satires of authority figures and classic Czech character studies.

A longtime collaborator with Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal, who wrote the book on which “Closely Watched Trains” was based, Menzel also adapted his books “Cutting it Short” and “Larks on a String.” The latter film, a 1969 send-up of young people forcibly recruited to a labor camp,...

Jiri Menzel, the Czech director who won the foreign-language film Oscar for 1966’s Closely Watched Trains, has died. He was 82.

Menzel’s wife, Olga Menzelova, posted the news on Instagram and Facebook on Sunday. She said that Menzel had died at home on Saturday. A cause of death was not given. Menzel was “the bravest among the brave,” she wrote, while commending his “courage, with [his] appetite and [his] will to live.”

A member of the Czech New Wave school of filmmakers alongside Milos Forman, Vera Chytilova and others, Closely Watched Trains was Menzel’s feature directorial debut ...

Jiri Menzel, the Czech director who won the foreign-language film Oscar for 1966’s Closely Watched Trains, has died. He was 82.

Menzel’s wife, Olga Menzelova, posted the news on Instagram and Facebook on Sunday. She said that Menzel had died at home on Saturday. A cause of death was not given. Menzel was “the bravest among the brave,” she wrote, while commending his “courage, with [his] appetite and [his] will to live.”

A member of the Czech New Wave school of filmmakers alongside Milos Forman, Vera Chytilova and others, Closely Watched Trains was Menzel’s feature directorial debut ...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Bungalow (Ulrich Köhler)

Ulrich Köhler remains underseen—even by the standards of Berlin School brethren Christian Petzold and Maren Ade—and a 4K restoration of his 2002 debut Bungalow comes at the right time: its story of isolation, frayed connections, and romantic infatuation foreground an only idyllic-seeming summer getaway. 18 years on, not a shred of it feels dated or resolved, down to a conclusion that puts one in mind of ’70s American classics.

Where to Stream: Grasshopper Film

Czechoslovak New Wave

A period of creative fervor and political deconstruction like few others in cinema, Czechoslovak New Wave is now getting a spotlight on The Criterion Channel. Selections includes Black Peter (Miloš Forman,...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Marielle Heller)

It sounds almost too perfect: Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers, the beloved children’s entertainer. Of course, who else could it be, really? It is so seemingly predestined, in fact, that Hanks’s first onscreen appearance as Fred Rogers elicits knowing laughter from the audience. Yes, Tom Hanks playing Mr. Rogers looks and sounds exactly how you would imagine. Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, however, is much more than an obvious biopic. It’s not really a biopic at all. Nor is it a rehash of 2018’s much-heralded documentary profile of Fred Rogers, Won’t You Be MyNeighbor?...

Exclusive: Czech filmmaker Václav Marhoul has signed with CAA.

Marhoul’s most recent film, The Painted Bird, premiered in competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival, where it won the Cinema for Unicef Award and is the Czech Republic’s international film entry at the 2020 Oscars.

The Holocaust pic, based on the controversial Joseph Kosinski novel follows a young Jewish boy in Eastern Europe who seeks refuge during World War II where he encounters many different characters. The pic has been in the works for quite some time through various re-writes, but Marhoul, who also wrote and produced The Painted Bird, got the project off the ground with a cast that includes Harvey Keitel, Stellan Skarsgard, Julian Sands and Udo Kier.

IFC picked up U.S. rights for The Painted Bird out of its Tiff premiere and will open the movie next year.

Marhoul previously directed Tobruck and Smart Philip.

Hard-hitting Venice Film Festival competition movie The Painted Bird has been selected by the Czech Film and Television Academy as the Czech Republic’s international Oscar entry.

Described as an “evocation of wild, primitive Eastern Europe at the bloody close of World War II,” director-producer Václav Marhoul’s black-and-white 35mm Holocaust feature follows the journey of The Boy, entrusted by his persecuted parents to an elderly foster mother. The old woman soon dies and The Boy is on his own, wandering through the countryside, from village to farmhouse. As he struggles for survival, The Boy suffers through extraordinary brutality meted out by the ignorant, superstitious peasants and he witnesses the terrifying violence of the efficient, ruthless soldiers, both Russian and German.

Adapted from the novel of the same name by Jerzy Kosinski (Being There), the dark drama prompted a number of walk-outs at Toronto and Venice due to its tough subject matter.

Simonschek plays the son of a former Nazi officer.

The first trailer for The Interpreter starring Peter Simonischek has been released exclusively to Screen International ahead of the film’s premiere in the Berlinale Special section on Friday 23.

Simonischek, who won the 2016 European Film Award for Best European Actor for Toni Erdmann, plays Georg, a retiree living in Vienna who is visited by Ali, an interpreter looking for the Nazi officer who may have killed his parents in Slovakia. The two men find a common interest, and begin a journey across Slovakia to find surviving witnesses of the wartime tragedy.

Ali is played by renowned Czech actor and director Jiří Menzel, who won the Academy Award for best foreign language film in 1968 for his film Closely Watched Trains

The film is directed by Slovakian Martin Šulík who made Gypsy, the Slovak Republic’s entry to the Academy Awards in 2011. He also won two Czech Lions for directing...

Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)

This week’s question: In honor of Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” what is the best coming-of-age movie ever made?

Siddhant Adlakha (@SidizenKane), Birth.Movies.Death.

While it may not fit the western paradigm of a traditional coming of age film (neither a high school setting nor teenage angst or confusion find themselves the focus), “Lion” holds the distinction of being a rare modern movie that gets to the root of key questions of dual identity, questions that will only become more prominent in the age of globalism. It’s the most extreme version of having your feet in two cultures; Saroo Brierley (Sunny Pawar, Dev Patel) finds himself...

Last week we learned, via the National Film Archive (Czech Republic) that Janus Films (and the Criterion Collection) had just signed a new deal with plans to bring 30 classic Czech films to the Us.

From the announcement:

The National Film Archive has concluded an important contract with distribution company Janus Films which opens the road to expending knowledge of Czech classic films in all of North America.

Among the more than 30 Czech classic films available to American audiences for screening in cinemas and on DVD in the Us and Canada are titles such as The Cremator, Marketa Lazarová, All My Good Countrymen, Three Nuts for Cinderella. It’s made possible thanks to a new contract signed by National Film Archive director Michal Bregant and distribution company Janus Films.

Michal Bregant offered a comment: “We have signed the contract symbolically this week in Bologna at the festival Il cinema ritrovato, which...

Railroad Tigers is one of those films where, despite its few-versus-many premise, the antagonist often feels like the one with nine lives. That is to say, it is not star Jackie Chan and his small band of freedom fighters who seem like they are surviving by the skin of their teeth, but instead gliding effortlessly through hazardous scenarios. With its 1941 setting in a small Chinese town invaded by the Japanese, this feels like a bit of an anomaly. Yet Chan and company dodge around, knock-out, and dupe their exceptionally silly Japanese oppressors (led by Hiroyuki Ikeuchi of Ip Man villainy) through almost every set-piece and moment of tension, conjuring up images of Buster Keaton or Road Runner. This function makes for some giddily fun scenarios, with wonderful choreography and cartoonish violence, but director and editor Ding Sheng makes the mistake of stuffing his two-plus-hour runtime with unnecessary downtime and bouts of narrative incoherence.

Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.

Martin Scorsese talks about the making of The King of Comedy with Vanity Fair‘s Simon Abrams:

I didn’t really understand where I stood in relationship to the film, the story, Rupert Pupkin, and Jerry Langford, too, until I was in the process of making the film—the shooting, the editing. I don’t think I necessarily liked what I found. What I mean is: I saw myself in Rupert, on the surface, as somebody that came from that appreciation of early television of the 50s—particularly New York variety comedy shows. Steve Allen, Jack Paar. These personalities were so vivid and so strong that they became something very new to me.

David’s Quick Take for the tl;dr Media Consumer:

Capricious Summer is fairly easy to watch (a slight 76 minute feature, in color), summarize (a whimsical sex comedy about three middle-aged men in a small rustic town are shaken out of their routines when they’re distracted by the arrival of an itinerant magician and his beautiful assistant) and compartmentalize (coming at the tail end of the Czech New Wave, this is Jiří Menzel’s less celebrated follow-up to the Oscar-winning Closely Watched Trains.) But just as conveniently as the film might fit within those pigeonholes, there’s a serious risk of underestimating what Menzel places before us here.

Comfortably nestled within a volume of the Eclipse Series expressly dedicated to the aforementioned Czech New Wave, Capricious Summer is at risk of being regarded as simply one of six quirky, enjoyable treats in that box. Each film has its own distinctive feel,...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Hard to Be a God is playing on Mubi in the Us through January 2.Hard to Be a GodRussian director Aleksei German spent the final 15 years of his life working on Hard To Be A God (2013), a brutal medieval epic adapted from a 1964 novel of the same name by Arkady and Boris Strutgatsky, dying just before he could complete the job in February 2013. Happily, his son and widow were able to oversee the final sound mix. The result is one of the most immersive and harrowing cinematic experiences going, three hours of being put to the sword and mired in the mud, blood and viscera of a nightmare alternate reality.Although German's characters are dressed in the clanking armour, chainmail and robes of the European Middle Ages, Hard To Be A God is in fact set on a distant planet,...

★★★★★ La petite mort is inextricably entwined with the grand one in Jiří Menzel's wonderful Closely Observed Trains (1966). A bittersweet and funny coming-of-age tale, it doubles as an allegorical quest for a nation's cojones amidst the milieu of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Freudian readings of narrative and mise en scène are lustily encouraged as the challenge of losing one's virginity becomes akin to an act of rebellious non-conformity, or even actual revolt.

Best Foreign Language Film Oscar 2016: 'Viva' with Héctor Medina. Multicultural Best Foreign Language Film Oscar 2016 submissions Nearly ten years ago, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences changed a key rule regarding entries for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar;* since then, things have gotten quite colorful. Just yesterday, Sept. 16, '15, Ireland submitted Paddy Breathnach's Viva – a Cuban-set drama spoken in Spanish. And why not? To name a couple more “multicultural and multinational” entries this year alone: China's submission, with dialogue in Mandarin and Mongolian, is Wolf Totem, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud – a Frenchman. And Germany's entry, Labyrinth of Lies, was directed by Giulio Ricciarelli, who happens to be a German-based, Italian-born stage and TV actor. 'Viva': Sexual identity in 21st-century Cuba Executive produced by Best Supporting Actor Academy Award winner Benicio Del Toro (Traffic), Viva tells the story of an 18-year-old Havana drag-club worker,...

Emboldened by such international successes as Jan Kadar’s The Shop on Main Street (1965) and Jiri Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains (1965), to name just a couple, Eastern European directors became more daring in both scale and viewpoint. Budapest native Miklós Jancsó’s Hungarian-ussr coproduction was expected (by Soviet officials, at least) to be a straightforward hymn to proletariat heroism. But... >> - Dennis Harvey -Dennis Harvey...

Emboldened by such international successes as Jan Kadar’s The Shop on Main Street (1965) and Jiri Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains (1965), to name just a couple, Eastern European directors became more daring in both scale and viewpoint. Budapest native Miklós Jancsó’s Hungarian-ussr coproduction was expected (by Soviet officials, at least) to be a straightforward hymn to proletariat heroism. But... >> - Dennis Harvey -Dennis Harvey...

This week on Off The Shelf, Ryan is joined by Brian Saur to take a look at the new DVD and Blu-ray releases for the week of June 16th, 2015, and chat about some follow-up and home video news.

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Episode Links & Notes Follow-up Unopened movies Christopher Lee News Thunderbean: Willie Whopper Blu-ray Pre-order Criterion September Line-up Scream Factory to release Army Of Darkness, Demon Knight and Bordello of Blood Arrow Video: Zardoz, The Mutilator, Requiescant, The Firemen’s Ball, Closely Watched Trains, Hard To Be A God, Society Masters Of Cinema / Eureka: The Skull Warner Bros. Hammer Horror Blu-ray Box Set Warner Bros Special Effects Boxset (Them!, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Son of Kong, Mighty Joe Young) Sony to release The Last Dragon on Blu-ray Scorpion: Burn Witch Burn Kino Cartoon Classics Announced Kl Studio Classics F/X 2 and The Challenge Universal to put out...

By Anjelica Oswald

Managing Editor

Set in 1960s Poland, Pawel Pawlikowski’s black-and-white drama Ida focuses on faith and identity after family secrets are revealed. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is a young orphan brought up in a convent preparing to take her vows to become a nun. When told she must visit her aunt, her only living relative, Anna discovers she’s Jewish, her name is actually Ida and her parents were killed in WWII. Anna/Ida and her aunt embark on a journey to learn more about the family’s history and discover the truth about what happened.

The film landed on the Oscar shortlist for best foreign-language film and was nominated for a Golden Globe in the same category.

A number of foreign films focused on WWII have done well at the Oscars throughout the years. Ones based on real events include The Counterfeiters (2007), about the Nazis’ attempt to...

Bill Hader has come a long way since his stint on Saturday Night Live, creating many popular characters and impersonations such as Stefon, Vincent Price and CNN’s Jack Cafferty. He is one of the highlights in such films as Adventureland, Knocked Up, Superbad and Pineapple Express, and so it is easy to see why author Mike Sacks interviewed him for his new book Poking A Dead Frog. In it, Hader talks about his career and he also lists 200 essential movies every comedy writer should see. Xo Jane recently published the list for those of us who haven’t had a chance to read the book yet. There are a ton of great recommendations and plenty I haven’t yet seen, but sadly my favourite comedy of all time isn’t mentioned. That would be Some Like It Hot. Still, it really is a great list with a mix of old and new.

Best Foreign Language Film Oscar 2014: ‘The Past,’ Berlin winner ‘Child’s Pose,’ Andrzej Wajda among notable omissions (photo: Asghar Farhadi’s ‘The Past,’ with Bérénice Bejo) (See previous post: "Best Foreign Language Film Oscar 2014 semi-finalists: Liv Ullmann, Mads Mikkelsen, Ziyi Zhang star vehicles.") The previous post focused on the nine semi-finalists for the 2014 Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film category. This post focuses on the surprising omissions from that list. ‘The Past’ The most glaring omission from the Academy’s list of Best Foreign Language Film semi-finalists is Asghar Farhadi’s Sony Pictures Classics-distributed (in the U.S.) The Past / Le Passé, starring Tahar Rahim and 2013 Cannes Film Festival Best Actress winner Bérénice Bejo. Iran’s official Oscar 2014 entry, The Past was considered a shoo-in following overwhelmingly positive notices — e.g., 93% approval rating and 8.6/10 average among Rotten Tomatoes‘ top critics — the fact that both Rahim (A Prophet...

News.

Starting this week, filmmaker, editor, critic and Notebook contributor Gina Telaroli will be seeing the premiere of her exquisite short feature Traveling Light, "a small-scale silent (aesthetically “silent”, but with a dense sound mix) charting a trip among friends from New York to Pittsburgh carefully constructed as a string of tiny moments" (Christopher Small), around the world in a variety of venues. The most ambitious on the ground presentation will be at New York's Anthology Film Archives, in whose series "Closely Watched Trains" Traveling Light is showing alongside such other brilliant train cinema as Shanghai Express, Emperor of the North, and The Narrow Margin. For those not in New York, stay tuned for news of the film's online premiere.

As Dave Kehr prepares to take on his new position as Adjunct Curator at MoMA, it has been announced that J. Hoberman will be taking over his video column in...

Czech comedy The Don Juans directed by Jiri Menzel will open the 44th International Film Festival of India (Iffi), Goa. The veteran director best-known for films like Closely Watched Trains and My Sweet Little Village, will also be bestowed the Lifetime Achievement award of the festival.

Academy award winning Hollywood actress Susan Sarandon (Thelma & Louise, Dead Man Walking, The Rocky Horror Picture Show) is expected to open the festival along with Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi.

The focus of the festival will be on the north-eastern states of India wherein their films and culture will be promoted. The festival will screen films from 70 countries this year.

Malayalam film Kanyaka Talkies by K. R. Manoj will open the feature film category while Kamal Swaroop’s Rangbhoomi will open the non-feature category of Indian Panorama at the festival. Read full Indian Panorama lineup here.

The 44th International Film Festival of India (Iffi) will...

‘Closely Watched Trains’: Oscar-winning movie classic gets special Academy screening (photo: Václav Neckár in ‘Closely Watched Trains’) Jirí Menzel’s first solo feature film, the World War II-set drama Closely Watched Trains / Ostre sledované vlaky (1966) was the 1967 Oscar winner in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Those living in the Los Angeles area will have the chance to watch a new print of Menzel’s classic on the big screen at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, September 23, 2013, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. To be hosted by Oscar-nominated writer-director Philip Kaufman, the Closely Watched Trains screening will feature a rare onstage discussion with Jirí Menzel himself. A mix of light comedy and somber drama, Closely Watched Trains tells the story of Milos (Václav Neckár), a young railway worker whose routine life in a small Czech town is upended following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia.

"I think the point about Marketa Lazarova is that when you first see it you're confused, and by that I mean you know that the whole story of what you're looking at is obscured, but it's still there, but you have to look hard." Peter Hames (film historian) Quick, name a Czechoslovakian film or film director... I would expect most of you are either drawing a blank or shouting out Milos Forman. The reason I ask is because on the back of Criterion's new Blu-ray release of Marketa Lazarova it reads, "In its native land, Frantisek Vlacil's Marketa Lazarova has been hailed as the greatest Czech film ever made; for many U.S. viewers, it will be a revelation." I can't speak to the first part of that statement as I believe this was the first, bonafide Czech film I've ever seen, but the second rings true. When it comes to Czech cinema,...

Jiri Menzel (L) with Shivendra Singh Dungarpur (R)

While Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s first documentary Celluloid Man continues a successful run in international film festivals (upcoming screenings include Edinburgh and Shanghai), the filmmaker is neck deep into his second. This time, the ambitious subject of his documentary is the celebrated Czech filmmaker Jiri Menzel.

It wasn’t easy for Dungarpur to convince the maverick director-who is known for speaking very little on his works-for a documentary. “A lot of friends from the Czech film industry asked me how I had managed to get him to agree to this,” says Dungarpur.

The story goes like this: he wrote to Menzel over several months before he agreed for a meeting in a café in Prague. The meeting that took so much of persuasion proved to be a success. Menzel was intrigued that an Indian filmmaker wanted to come all the way to...

Founded in 1999 by students at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, the Nippon Connection film festival has become the biggest platform for current Japanese cinema outside of Japan. The festival prides itself on the proportion of premieres: in 2012, of 142 shorts and features screened, 42 were world premieres and 14 international premieres. Most of the remaining films were either European or German premieres. In short, if you want to see the latest Japanese films without actually going to Japan, Frankfurt is the place to be.

It’s worth having a look at Nippon Connection’s web site, not just for information about the festival (in both German and English), but also to appreciate its award-winning design, which could serve as an example to many larger film festivals. Last year’s site was framed by imbricated petals in varying shades of pink, evoking a digital carpet of cherry blossoms, a magical anime fish, or even...

With apologies to Ernest Hemingway and "A Moveable Feast," you can call this one a Moveable Fest. The Czech That Film Festival, which begins five days of screening in Los Angeles on Friday, is a festival on the go, hitting three cities before stopping in L.A. with another seven on the itinerary afterwards. From the 1968 Oscar winner "Closely Watched Trains" to last year's acclaimed Oscar entry "In the Shadow," and from 1964 Czech musical "The Hop Pickers" to the 2011 rotoscope-animated noir "Alois Nebel," the festival is taking a cross-section...

The French New Wave was not the only new wave of the 1960s: during a temporary loosening of the Communist regime’s hold on culture, Czechoslovakia had its own new wave that produced films just as beautiful, witty, exciting, innovative and thought-provoking as the French. The 1960s saw two Czechoslovak winners of the foreign language Oscar: The Shop on Main Street in 1965 and Closely Observed Trains in 1967. Like the French New Wave filmmakers, Czech New Wave directors such as Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová and Jan Němec were well-versed in film history. Although Communism had restricted their access to more recent international trends in film, philosophy, politics, art and literature, during the 1960s Czechoslovak students, artists and intellectuals had greater access to contemporary movements and ideas and embraced them enthusiastically. The country was also able to reconnect with its own artistic and cultural past, formerly repressed by Communism: one major example is the work of Kafka,...

1.) Albert Brooks is returning to voice Nemo's father, Marlin, in Finding Nemo 2. Ellen DeGeneres is also expected to return as the forgetful Dory with Andrew Stanton set to direct. At this point there are no plot details, though a 2016 release date is expected. Deadline 2.) Safe House director Daniel Espinosa is attached to direct an adaptation of John Grisham's "The Racketeer" for Fox and New Regency. The book sees a federal judge murdered at a lakeside cabin and the contents of his safe emptied. The only man who knows the whos and whys is a former attorney serving time in federal prison who hopes to parlay that into getting revenge on the people who put him there. THR 3.) More Twilight fan fiction is targeting a big screen adaptation while Universal tries to figure out what they're going to do with Fifty Shades of Grey. Constantin Film has acquired movie...

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist and Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis were both released in 1970, both based on novels (by Alberto Moravia and Giorgio Bassani, respectively) and both set during World War II. De Sica’s film covers the beginning of Fascist atrocities, while Bertolucci’s film covers the end. The two films are also complementary in terms of their central characters: while the eponymous conformist joins up as a Fascist hitman, the Finzi-Continis are potential victims of the regime. Perhaps it is for this reason that De Sica’s film so easily carries the director’s gentle and engaging mark, while much of Bertolucci’s feature is as cold and charmless as Fascist architecture.

Fans of De Sica will find in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis both beloved characteristics of the director’s famed neo-realist approach, and stimulating new additions such as warm colour photography,...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: April 24, 2012

Price: DVD $69.99

Studio: Criterion

A scene from Věra Chytilová's 1966 farce Daisies.

Of all the cinematic New Waves that broke over the world in the 1960s, the one in Czechoslovakia was among the most fascinating and radical, as can be seen in the five feature-length films and five shorts found in Criterion’s Eclipse Series 32: Pearls of The Czech New Wave.

With a wicked sense of humor and a healthy streak of surrealism, a group of directors in Czechoslovakia —including future Oscar winners Miloš Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and Ján Kadár (The Shop on Main Street)—began to use film to speak out about the hypocrisy and absurdity of the Communist state.

The four-disc collection kicks off the 1966 omnibus film Pearls of the Deep, which introduced five of the movement’s best-known voices: Věra Chytilová, Jaromil Jireš, Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec,...

The Twitch-curated Attack The Bloc series of Cold War era science fiction films from the Eastern Bloc continues Friday with a 9:30 pm screening of Czech oddity Ferat Vampire at the Tiff Bell Lightbox.Ambulance medic Dr. Marek (Jirí Menzel, director of the classic Closely Watched Trains) is shocked and dismayed when his beloved nurse and driver Mima (Dagmar Veskrnová) is lured away to become a rally-car driver for car manufacturer Ferat. He's even more shocked (and rightly!) when a fellow doctor tells him that Ferat's much-hyped new sports car is fuelled by the blood of its driver, and becomes determined to free Mima from the clutches of the evil corporation. Brilliant and prolific Slovak director Juraj Herz -- whose darkly funny and supremely creepy...

"Josef Škvorecký, the Czech-Canadian novelist whose stories of life under totalitarianism drew on his own experiences of both Nazism and Communism, died on Tuesday," reports Joseph Brean for Postmedia News. "He was 87. His novel The Engineer of Human Souls, a humorous account of the absurdity of totalitarianism, won the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction in 1984, and he was awarded the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1980."

From Reuters: "Škvorecký and his author wife Zdena Salivarova set up the Sixty-Eight Publishers in Toronto after leaving Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1968 Soviet invasion that crushed hopes of the 'Prague Spring' reforms. He published 227 titles in total. Škvorecký's death comes after fellow leading lights of the Czech artistic anti-communist generation also died in the past year. They include [Václav] Havel, who died in December, as well as authors Ivan Martin Jirous, Arnost Lustig and Jiří Gruša."

"Škvorecký left no shortage of legacies to remember him by,...

Influential Czech film director with a talent for self-preservation

The Czech film director Otakar Vávra, who has died aged 100, was born in Bohemia when it was part of the Austro- Hungarian empire, and was seven years old when Czechoslovakia became an independent nation in 1918. He lived through the German occupation, communism and the Velvet Revolution, and saw his country become the Czech Republic in 1993, while never ceasing to make films. In each epoch, Vávra changed his skin in order to save it.

Among his lasting achievements was the film faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (Famu) in Prague, which he helped establish after the second world war and where he taught for five decades. Among his students were Vera Chytilová, Milos Forman, Ivan Passer and Jiri Menzel, all directors of the 60s Czech new wave, and more recently Emir Kusturica, all of whom had high praise for his teaching.

The feature debut of director Tomáš Lunák, Alois Nebel (2011) is an animated film based on a trilogy of graphic novels by Jaromír99 and Jaroslav Rudiš. The film’s black-and-white images sometimes look like a graphic novel come to life. At other times, they possess the stark enchantment of woodblock prints. Through the use of rotoscope animation, the characters’ smallest gestures are incredibly lifelike.

Alois Nebel is a middle-aged train dispatcher in the village of Bilý Potok. It is the period leading up to the Velvet Revolution, which will see the end of Communism in Czechoslovakia, but Alois keeps remembering the end of another era. Every time a train passes through the station with a cloud of steam, a ‘fog’ descends on him, and he has flashbacks of the end of World War II, when Germans were deported en masse from the region—including a woman who had been a mother to him during the war.

Celebrated Czech director and teacher Otakar Vavra has died at the age of 100.

The filmmaker passed away in Prague on Thursday.

Vavra began making films in the 1930s and rose to fame after World War Two.

He took home the top prize at Spain's San Sebastian Film Festival in 1965 for Golden Queen, while 1967's Romance for Bugle was another of his best-known works.

Vavra was also famous for establishing Prague's Famu film school, where his students included filmmaker Milos Forman, who went on to win two Oscars for Best Director - his first in 1976 for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the second in 1985 for Amadeus.

Another of Vavra's proteges was Jiri Menzel, whose movie Closely Observed Trains won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1968.

On a friend’s unfashionable laptop, when DearCinema.com went live, little did I know that my life was about to change! Something that I thought I was doing in my free time, the little that I got from my hectic job, is going to drive me crazy to leave everything behind to start on a journey where no roadmap can be of any help. A road filled with doubts and discoveries, excitement and agonies, apprehensions and re-affirmed faith!

I still wonder why on earth there wasn’t already a DearCinema.com! Had there been one, life would have been much different.

I guess, there come moments of truths in everyone’s life, when one has to get out of the comfort of lies that we weave around ourselves. I was quite a well-to-do, reasonably successful, television journalist and producer, when I suddenly started missing a life I had left behind in a small,...