Film director Menzel receives high Romanian decoration

Prague, May 18 (CTK) - Czech Oscar-winning film director Jiri Menzel, 73, received Romania's high decoration for his achievements in culture, the order of the president imposed by Romanian President Traian Basescu, from Culture Minister Kelemen Hunor in Bucharest Wednesday.

"The decoration is an unexpected honour to me. I was surprised since I had not known about it before my departure from Prague. I have been to Bucharest for the fourth time and I always like to return there," Menzel, one of the main protagonists of the Czechoslovak New Film Wave of the 1960s, told CTK.

Menzel attended a retrospective of his films held by the Czech Centre in Bucharest that ends Wednesday.

The event was opened by the screening of Menzel's film Cutting It Short (Postriziny, 1980), based on a novel by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. Over 500 people took part in the following discussion, Menzel said.

The Cinema Studio in Bucharest also offered his Closely Watched Trains (Ostre sledovane vlaky, 1966), another adaptation of Hrabal's book, which won the prestigious Oscar award for the best non-English speaking film in 1967, as well as Capricious Summer (Rozmarne leto, 1968) and Larks on a String (Skrivanci na niti, 1969), based on Hrabal's short-stories, which was banned and released to cinemas in 1990 only after the fall of the Communist regime. It won the Golden Bear at the 40th Berlin International Film Festival in the same year.

The festival culminated with Menzel's latest feature film, I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglickeho krale, 2006), which is also based on Hrabal's novel.

"Jiri Menzel is very popular in Romania among the older and young generations. Moreover, the local audiences can see a parallel between the then Czech and current Romanian film wave that scores success in the world now," Rene Kubasek, director of the Czech Centre in Bucharest, said.