Prague  - Former Czech president Vaclav Havel has agreed to work with Czech-American film director Milos Forman on his planned new film, Havel's office confirmed Thursday.

Havel, a communist-era dissident playwright, has cooperated on a screenplay with Forman for a film about the 1938 Munich Conference, in which Czechoslovak allies allowed Hitler to annex the country's German-inhabited border regions.

Czechs view the deal, signed on September 30 by France, Germany, Italy and Britain, as a betrayal by the French who failed to honour military alliances between Paris and Prague.

Forman and Havel's script is based on a 2007 novel by French journalist Georges-Marc Benamou, The Ghost of Munich, which will be published in Czech two weeks before the agreement's 70th anniversary.

The acclaimed film director and the former head of state have been friends since they attended the same high school in the spa town of Podebrady near the Czech capital. (dpa)