Vojtěch Jasný: A Lifetime In Film

This year's Zlin Film Festival, which is currently running in the UNESCO Heritage city in the northeast corner of the Czech Republic, is providing its visitors and local audiences with an encyclopedic survey of the best Czech and Slovak films of the past 50 years (mirroring the Festival's own 50th anniversary this year). Participating in these festivities is a dapper gentleman of a certain age who has spent a lifetime in the worlds of film in his native Czech Republic and, for the past twenty five years, in the United States.

Vojtech Jasny was born in the town of Telč in Moravia on November 30, 1925. After studying at film school with other soon-to-be-famous Czech filmmakers, he was an active and influential filmmaker in what was then Czechoslovakia throughout the 1950's and 1960's. In the immediate postwar era, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Communist regime and believed in its utopian vision of a just society, following the deprivations of the war, when his father was killed at Auschwitz. As a young film school studen,t he shot a few films which sang the praises of the emerging communist system. One of them was THE EXTRAORDINARY YEARS, a documentary which he made in 1952 with another director who later became a Czech film legend, Karel Kachyna. In the spirit of the time, this propaganda film praises collectivization and denounces its opponents.

In 1963, he made one of his famous films. THE CASSANDRA CAT is an allegorical fable about a magical cat that comes to a small Czech town and causes the underlying nature of the townspeople to be revealed in visually stunning, colorful and musical scenes. The film won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and helped establish the Czech cinema as one of the leading forces in the film world of the 1960s.

In 1968, the year of the famous Prague Spring, he made one of his enduring masterpieces. ALL MY GOOD COUNTRYMEN is the deceptively simple story of the lives and fates of several rural Czechs in a small Moravian village as they struggle to adapt and survive under communist rule in the 1950s.  In a gentle way it explores the human spirit in the backdrop of the dramatic political changes of those times. Czech villages and relationships among their inhabitants were badly affected by the process of forced collectivization of farms. The film is very critical of these events and reflected the openness of the Prague Spring period that allowed for such blatant criticism of the policies of the state.

However, the film did not stay in Czech cinemas for long. After Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia in August and hard line communists replaced the liberally oriented Dubcek regime, the film was banned. Since Vojtech Jasny would not be allowed to shoot any other films, unless they supported the regime, he decided to leave the country. At first he found work in Austria, West Germany and Yugoslavia, but eventually relocated to New York City in the early 1980s. In New York, he crafted a second career as a film educator, having taught film directing classes at Columbia University (where his compatriot Milos Forman was the head of the film program), eventually teaching at the School of Visual Arts and the New York Film Academy.

 Milos Forman and Vojtech Jasny

He has received many awards and accolades over the years, including: Best Director, Special Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival; Silver Shell, Prix D'Italia; Red Ribbon, American Film and Video Association; Plaque de la Ville de Paris, French International Film Festival; San Sebastian International Film Festival; Lifetime Achievement Award, Moscow International Film Festival; Lifetime Achievement Award, New Delhi International Film Festival; Lifetime Achievement Award, Czech Lion.

For the vital Vojtěch Jasný, still going strong at the age 85, returning to the Czech Republic is a bittersweet experience. It was the country where he experienced his greatest triumphs but he has also has memories of great losses and tragedies during the Nazi occupation, the postwar Communist regime and the subsequent Russian occupation that eventually forced him to leave his native country for good. However, with many of Vojtěch Jasný's classic films playing at the Zlin Film Festival this week, including a new documentaryon his life and career, THE LABYRINTHINE BIOGRAPHIES OF VOJTECH JASNY by Arkaitz Basterra Zalbide, it has been a warm coming home for the film veteran.

Sandy Mandelberger, Festival Dailies Editor