Petr Zelenka

Graduated in scriptwriting and dramaturgy from the Film Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Made his debut as a director in 1993 with a film about punk, Visací zámek. In 1997, he premiered his most highly awarded film, the episodic film Buttoners, which won the prestigious Czech Lion for best script, direction and film. The popular film Loners (2000) was based on Zelenka’s script. For his recent films Year of the Devil (2003) and Tales of Common Insanity (2005) he was awarded by main prizes at the International Film Festivals in Karlovy Vary resp. Moscow.

In 2008, he introduced his film Karamazov that the Czech Film Academy sent out to the Academy Awards competition as the Best non-English film. Since 2011, he has directed the HBO series Therapy, starring Karel Roden. Currently the third season of the show is being produced. In autumn 2015, the audience greatly acclaimed his film comedy Lost in Munich that by means of mystery comedy describes the events around the 1936 Munich Agreement. In the future Petr Zelenka is preparing the film Modelář.

He made his debut in the theatre with translations of plays by Michael Frayn. His debut as a playwright and, for the first time, a theatre director was with Tales of Common Insanity, which in 2001 won the prestigious Alfréd Radok Award for play of the year.
In 2006, his Teremin was staged at the Dejvicke Theater (abroad, for example, it was produced as a staged reading in Paris, in December 2011). The production of DD was hosted in April 2017 in the renowned Deutsches Theatre in Berlin. His play, Coming Clean (2007) was commissioned by the famous Narodowy Stary Theatre in Cracow, Poland. The play Endangered Species was premiered in the National Theatre in Prague (New Stage) in November 2011.

In December 2012, Zelenka, as a playwright and director, returned to Dejvicka Theatre with Dabing Street.
In May 2014, the South Bohemian Theatre in České Budějovice staged Job Interviews that Petr Zelenka wrote directly for the theatre and directed it himself. The starring actress Věra Hlaváčková was nominated for the Thalia Award in the Best Actress category. In April 2016, the directors Marcial Di Fonzo Bo and Elizabeth Vigier staged the play in the French Comédie de Caen under the title Vera. The star casted production including the prominent film and theatre actress, Karin Viardová, in the title role, is currently celebrating success throughout France, and ran for several weeks in the famous Théâtre des Abbesses in Paris, in spring of 2017.

Zelenka’s adaptation of Frayn’s one-act play Noises Off, under the title Train Departures, was introduced in Astorka Theatre, Bratislava, in February 2004 and in Warsaw, in March 2017.
Zelenka’s plays have been translated into various languages and many of them also have been printed abroad – including the prestigious French Les Solitaires Intempestifs edition. The Czech versions of his dramatic works have been published by the Akropolis Publishing House under the title Ordinary Madness, in 2012.

Petr Zelenka (*1967)
Chosen plays