Vojtěch Jasný facts for kids

Vojtěch Jasný (born November 30, 1925 – died November 15, 2019) was a famous Czech director, writer, and film professor. He made and wrote more than 50 movies! Jasný created both feature films (regular movies) and documentaries (real-life films) in countries like Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, the USA, and Canada. He was a very important person in the Czechoslovak New Wave movement of the 1960s, which was a time when many new and exciting films were made in Czechoslovakia. People especially remember him for his movies The Cassandra Cat and All My Compatriots. Both of these films won awards at the famous Cannes Film Festival. Besides making movies, he also taught film directing at schools in Salzburg, Vienna, Munich, and New York.

Life of a Filmmaker

Early Years and Education

Vojtěch Jasný was born in Kelč, Czechoslovakia, on November 30, 1925. His father was a teacher. In 1929, his father bought a movie projector for a local club called Sokol. This was how young Vojtěch first saw movies. After watching a film called The Little Match Girl, he decided he wanted to become a filmmaker. As a teenager, he made his own amateur movies using a 9mm camera.

During World War II, a very difficult time, his father was arrested and sadly died in 1942. After the war, Jasný first studied philosophy and the Russian language. But he soon changed his mind and began studying filmmaking in 1946 at the new FAMU in Prague. He learned from famous professors like Karel Plicka and Vsevolod Pudovkin.

A New Wave Director

Starting in 1950, Jasný worked with Karel Kachyňa to direct many documentaries. His movies Desire and The Cassandra Cat were both nominated for the Palme d'Or, which is a top award at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1968, he directed All My Compatriots. This film won him the Best Director award at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.

Life After Czechoslovakia

After the Prague Spring of 1968, when the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia happened, Jasný decided to leave his home country. He continued to make movies and teach at film schools in Austria, Germany, and Yugoslavia. Later, in the early 1980s, he moved to Brooklyn, New York. In the USA, Jasný taught film directing at well-known universities like Columbia University and the School of Visual Arts. He also made several documentaries about Czechoslovakia. His last feature film, Return to Paradise Lost, was made in 1999.

In 2009, a documentary about Jasný's life and films was made by Arkaitz Basterra Zalbide. It was called Life and Film (The Labyrinthine Biographies of Vojtěch Jasný). Vojtěch Jasný passed away on November 13, 2019, at the age of 93.

His Films

Vojtěch Jasný made many different kinds of films, from full-length movies to TV shows and documentaries.

Feature Films

Here are some of the main feature films he worked on:

Television Work

Vojtěch Jasný also directed many films for television. These often included adaptations of books or plays. Some of his TV films include:

• 1970: Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit (based on a story by Heinrich Böll)
• 1974: Der Kulterer (based on a book by Thomas Bernhard)
• 1974: Frühlingsfluten (based on Torrents of Spring)
• 1980: The Ideas of Saint Clara
• 1982: Wir (based on the 1921 Russian novel We)
• 1984: The Blind Judge (a TV series with 13 episodes)

Documentaries

He also made many documentaries, which are films about real events or people. Some of his documentaries include:

• 1950: They Know What to Do
• 1954: Old Chinese Opera
• 1969: Czech Rhapsody
• 1989: Miloš Forman: Portrait (about another famous director)
• 1991: Why Havel? (about Václav Havel, a former president of Czechoslovakia)

See also

In Spanish: Vojtěch Jasný para niños