KVIFF President’s Award For Outstanding Contribution To Czech Cinema To Be Presented To Editor Jiří Brožek

At the closing ceremony of this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the President’s Award for Outstanding Contribution to Czech Cinema will be presented to editor Jiří Brožek.

A nine-time winner of the Czech Lion Award, Jiří Brožek has worked on more than a hundred Czech films, television productions and series. He is the absolute record holder in terms of the number of annual Czech Film and Television Academy awards for one profession across all categories.

After graduating from FAMU in Prague in 1973, Brožek joined Barrandov Studios, where he worked for the next twenty years. Editor Jiřina Lukešová, under whom he gained experience as an assistant editor, recommended him to directors Jiří Menzel and Jaroslav Papoušek, and Brožek’s first independent work as an editor was on Papoušek’s Finally We Understand Each Other.

During his time at Barrandov, he applied his editing skills to a number of major films and worked with leading Czech directors such as Jiří Menzel (Cutting It Short, The Snowdrop Festival, The End of Old Times, I Served the King of England, and the Oscar-nominated comedy My Sweet Little Village) or Věra Chytilová (Story from a Housing Estate, Calamity, The Jester and the Queen). He also was a longtime collaborator of Karel Kachyňa (Love Between the Raindrops; Nurses; The Train of Childhood and Expectation; Golden Eels; The Death of the Beautiful Deer; Watch Out, the Doctor Is on His Round!), Ladislav Smoljak (Ball Lightning; Waiter, Scarper!; Uncertain Season; Jára Cimrman Lying, Sleeping), Dušan Klein (How the World Is Losing Poets, How Poets Are Losing Their Illusions, How Poets Are Enjoying Their Lives, Good Pigeons Return), Jaroslav Soukup (Wind in the Pocket, Love from the Arcade, Fists in the Dark), and Karel Smyczek (Snowdrops and Daredevils, Landscape with Furniture).

Since the early 1990s, following his departure from Barrandov Studios, Brožek has regularly collaborated with the new generation of directors. He earned his first Czech Lion in 1993 for his work on Jaroslav Brabec’s Horror Story, worked on various films and series directed by Vladimír Michálek, including the award-winning drama Sekal Has to Die (1998 Czech Lion) and Angel Exit (2000), and collaborated with Vladimír Morávek (2003 Czech Lion for Boredom in Brno) and Petr Nikolaev (2007 Czech Lion for It's Gonna Get Worse). He has also worked repeatedly with Martin Šulík (2005 Czech Lion for The City of the Sun). Brožek collaborated with Šulík and historian Jan Lukeš on The Golden Sixties, an extensive documentary project about Czechoslovak cinema of the 1960s. His final collaboration with the legendary Věra Chytilová (the bitter comedy Pleasant Moments, 2006) earned him another Czech Lion. More Czech Lion Awards for his editing work came with Václav Havel’s film debut Leaving (2011) and Tereza Nvotová’s Filthy (2017).

Jiří Brožek’s creative personality has had a lasting and indelible influence on Czech cinema. “Editing is a very intimate affair,” he once said in an interview about his work. “The important thing is the content of the film I am editing. You have to listen and understand the message so that the audience can understand it as well. It’s like football – we’re all on one team.”

As a tribute to Jiří Brožek, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will present The Death of the Beautiful Deer, on which he collaborated with director Karel Kachyňa.