CzechMate: In Search of Jirí Menzel (2018)

After almost a year of phone calls and emails, director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur convinced Jiri Menzel to meet him in a cafe in Prague on October 19, 2010. And so began a friendship that has culminated in a seven-hour long film that not only explores the deceptively whimsical comic films of Jiri Menzel, but also discovers the fascinating world of the Czechoslovakian New Wave.

This was a movement peopled by brilliant artists paradoxically making films funded by an oppressive regime, beautifully disguising their subversiveness through humour and artistry. The documentary looks at a period of over four decades from the nationalization of the Czech film industry in 1948, to the birth of the Czechoslovak New Wave in the early '60s - a period that was marked by major historical events like the short-lived Prague Spring in 1968 and the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in the same year followed by 21 years of 'normalization' under the Communist regime culminating in the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The changing political landscape resulted in an ever-tightening stranglehold on the creative freedom of these artists. Yet they continued to make films that whispered rebellion often at the risk of their livelihood, even their lives. While Menzel was the key that opened the door, the film encompasses the constellation of stars that dotted the firmament of this extraordinary universe including Vera Chytilova, Milos Forman, Vojtech Jasny, Ivan Passer, Evald Schorm, Jan Schmidt, Pavel Juracek, Juraj Jakubisko, Dusan Hanak, Elo Havetta, Stefan Uher, Jan Nemec, Drahomíra Vihanova and Miroslav Ondricek. The film was eight years in the making and 85 personalities have been interviewed for the documentary, including some of the most prominent filmmakers from across the globe such as: Woody Allen, Ken Loach, Emir Kusturica, Raoul Coutard, Istvan Szabo and Andrzej Wajda. The film has a depth and scale that is unparalleled in the study of the Czechoslovakian New Wave: the socio-political crucible that created this unique movement, the influence of writers like Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera and Josef Skvorecky that shaped the work of these filmmakers, the poignancy of a generation of filmmakers who fell off the map and the joy of discovering artists that the world forgot. Given its large canvas, the film has a surprising intimacy as it revisits these pictures from the old world.