Dušan Klein, director of popular ‘poetry’ film series, dies at age 82

Film director and screenwriter Dušan Klein, a Holocaust survivor best known for a series of films about poetry, died on Sunday at the age of 82.

Born Julius Klein, on June 27, 1939, in Michalovce (now in Slovakia), he survived internment as a child in the wartime ghetto and concentration camp Terezín.

After the war, Klein went on to study film directing at FAMU in Prague and made his feature-length debut in 1964 with the psychological thriller Místenka bezráti.

He was director of the Barrandov Film Studio from 1975 to 1991. The first three parts of his legendary “poetry” series in the 1980s attracted over 5 million viewers.