On Saturday, at the festival’s closing ceremony, legendary editor Jiří Brožek will become the first editor to receive the KVIFF President’s Award. Brožek, who has worked with directors such as Jiří Menzel, Věra Chytilová, Ladislav Smoljak, Vladimír Michálek and Karel Kachyňa, presented The Death of the Beautiful Deer at the Karlovy Vary Theatre.
Ahead of the screening, Marek Eben delivered a speech in which he called the editor’s role unjustly overlooked. Besides the artistic importance of the profession, he noted another underappreciated aspect: “We’ve never awarded an editor at the festival before. When a director finds a good editor, they cling to them tooth and nail. An editor has to be a psychologist and, given the nature of the directors, sometimes a psychiatrist too,” Eben remarked.
Then Jiří Brožek took the stage to a warm welcome from the audience. “I haven’t seen The Death of the Beautiful Deer in forty years. In the autumn, Jiří Bartoška called me and said he wanted to interview me at the festival and that I should choose the film to bring. I sent him a few suggestions, and he called back and said it had to be something by Kachyňa,” began the 87-year-old editor and went on to recall not only Karel Kachyňa but also the recently deceased Vladimír Smutný, the film’s director of photography, whom he described as an excellent colleague.
“And I wish you enjoy the film and have fun,” concluded Brožek, whose impressive filmography includes more than 180 titles. Some of those films were then shown in a brief clip, a compilation of his editing work, before the screening of a masterfully told adaptation of Ota Pavel’s short stories, projected from 35mm film.
