Jirí Menzel

Larks On A String Jirí Menzel

Czech filmmaker Jiri Menzel directs this comedy drama set in a labour camp in 1950s Communist-run Prague. The film tells the stories of the various characters interned in the labour camp-cum-scrapyard, who have been deemed counter-revolutionary and 'bourgeois' by the Czech government and are now forced to spend their days sorting out piles of scrap metal for the purposes of 're-education'. As they toil, the workers - who include a literature professor, a public prosecutor, a dairyman, a saxophonist, a barber and a cook - philosophise and flirt amid the detritus of industrial society.

Although shot in 1969, the film was banned by the Czech government until the fall of the Communist regime in 1990.