Elmar Klos; Czech Filmmaker won Academy Award in ’66

Elmar Klos, 83, a Czech filmmaker who won an Academy Award for best foreign language film in 1966. Klos, who worked in the film industry since he was 17, made more than 10 films in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1966, he and the late Slovak director Jan Kadar won an Oscar for their 1965 work “The Shop on Main Street.” The film was one of the few made in the Soviet Bloc that described the Nazi persecution of Jews. Born in Brno, the capital of Moravia, Klos was a screenwriter and teacher at Prague’s prestigious Film Faculty from 1946, and helped nurture the New Age cinema that brought Czech films to world attention in the 1960s. He was fired in 1972 for political reasons, but returned to the faculty after the 1989 revolution that ended Communist rule. In Prague on July 19.