Fiction Tuesdays, a film program of the Czech Center in Bucharest, focuses at this edition on a retrospective dedicated to the creative partnership of writer Bohumil Hrabal and director Jiří Menzel.

“Hrabal and Menzel built together a universe recognizable through its ironic humor, humanism, and attention to ordinary people caught up in the whirlwind of history. The prose of Hrabal, with its ample and ludic phrases, found in the cinema of Menzel a visual form that kept its spirit and inner rhythm. The films in the program are adaptations from the writer’s books and can be seen as a retrospective of this collaboration, from the debut that brought the Oscar to Czechoslovakia and censored films to nostalgic evocations of community and memory,” a presentation from the Czech Center reads.

The program opens on March 17 with Closely Watched Trains (1966), an adaptation from Hrabal’s novella of the same name and Menzel’s first feature film. In a train station in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, young Miloš Hrma is undergoing his own coming-of-age, while history makes its presence felt in the background. Awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1968, it is one of the defining works of the Czechoslovak New Wave.

Larks on a String (1969), made at the height of Hrabal and Menzel’s collaboration, is scheduled for March 24. Set in a 1950s ‘re-education’ camp, the film follows a group of marginals forced to work in a scrapyard, a symbol of a society trying to rewrite its past. Censored and banned for two decades, the film was launched after 1990 and received the Golden Bear at the Berlinale.

Cutting It Short (1981), an adaptation of the autobiographical novel Postřižiny, will be screened on March 31. An evocation of Hrabal’s childhood in Nymburk, the film keeps the “exuberant tone of his prose and turns daily life into a celebration of personal freedom and the joy of living.”

The retrospective ends on April 7 with The Snowdrop Festival (1984), a mosaic of characters and events taking place in a village near Prague. Without a conventional plot, the film captures petty rivalries, obsessions, and collective rituals, composing an ironic and tender portrait of the community.

The screenings take place at the Czech Center, starting at 19:30. Entrance is free, within the available seating. The films are screened with English subtitles.

(Photo: still from The Snowdrop Festival, courtesy of Czech Center)

simona@romania-insider.com