The Prague Post reports on a potentially intriguing film collaboration between two of the elder statesmen of Czech culture: playwright and former president Václav Havel and director Miloš Forman. Inspired by (as opposed to based on) the novel The Ghost of Munich by French journalist Georges-Marc Benamou, it’s an account of the British and French abandonment of what was then Czechoslovakia to the Nazis in September 1938.
If the project goes ahead, it won’t be the first example of a major Czech director exploring one of the darkest periods of his country’s history. While still in exile from communist Czechoslovakia, Jan Němec co-directed (with Otto Olejar) a lengthy documentary-cum-dramatised reconstruction, Peace In Our Time? for Britain’s Channel Four (broadcast on 8 September 1988), the casting of John Cleese as a fumbling, incompetent Neville Chamberlain making it a bitterly ironic comment on the man who notoriously described the place as “a faraway country of which we know little”. If the Havel/Forman project gets off the ground, it would make a terrific DVD extra.