“The Don Juans “ (Don Sajini) directed by Jiri Menzel will open the 44th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) 2013

“The Don Juans “ (Don Sajini) directed by auteur film maker from Czech , Jiri Menzel will open the 44th International Film Festival of India (IFFI), Goa. That gem of the Czech New Wave won the Oscar for his film Closely Watched Trains in the  best foreign-language film category.; Menzel was only 28 at the time. He was nominated again in 1986 for another dark comedy, My Sweet Little Village, and four years later, after the Velvet Revolution, won the Golden Bear at Berlin for Larks on a String, a satire he made in 1969 but that the Communists had long banned. It’s as a film auteur, as well as a very active theatre director and actor (in more than 70 roles), that Menzel has made his mark on Czech history, often adapting the novels of his contemporary, Bohumil Hrabal, “the Czech Bukowski,” including Closely Watched Trains and I Served the King of England. Opera is the subject, medium and language of Jiri Menzil’s The Don Juans , revolving around a production of “Don Giovanni” by a Czech small-town troupe “This film is about Mozart’s Don Giovanni, but it is aimed mainly at today’s  young audiences.That is why the traditional instruments, today almost impossible to listen to, must be placed. So ,instead of violins  we will use electric guitars and the music will be pumped up by an amplified drum kit.In short-heavy metal…We all know that old Wolfgang Amadeus did not always compose as well as he could have ,so we sometimes have to meddle with the melodies too…Etc…In our version ,Mozart will be perfect” says Jiri Menzil about the film.