Quick Facts
Biography
Vojtěch Jasný (30 November 1925 – 15 November 2019) was a Czech director, screenwriter and professor who has written and directed over 50 films. Jasný made feature and documentary films in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, USA & Canada. He is best remembered for his movies The Cassandra Cat and All My Compatriots, both of which won prizes at Cannes Film Festival. In addition to his film career he taught directing at film schools in Salzburg, Vienna, Münich and New York.
Life
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 Sokol club, which provided Jasný's first introduction to cinema. After watching Renoir's The Little Match Girl he decided to become a filmmaker. During his teens he made amateur movies on a 9mm camera. During the WWII his father was arrested and sent to Auschwitz where he died in 1942. After the war Jasný went to study philosophy and Russian language but he switched to study filmmaking at newly founded FAMU in 1946. His professors were Karel Plicka, Vsevolod Pudovkin and hosting professors Cesare Zavattini and Giuseppe De Santis. Since 1950 he co-directed many documentaries with Karel Kachyňa. His movies Desire and The Cassandra Cat were nominated for Palme d'Or. In 1968 he directed All My Compatriots which won the award for Best Director at 1969 Cannes Film Festival.
After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia following the Prague Spring of 1968 he decided to leave the country. Jasný made movies and taught at film schools in Austria, West Germany and Yugoslavia until relocating to Brooklyn, New York in the early 1980s. In the USA Jasný taught film directing classes at Columbia University, School of Visual Arts and New York Film Academy and made several documentaries about Czechoslovakia. His last feature film Return to Paradise Lost was made in 1999.
In 2009 Arkaitz Basterra Zalbide made a documentary about Jasný called Life and Film (The Labyrinthine Biographies of Vojtěch Jasný) which was later released as a book.
He died in Přerov, Czech Republic in November 2019, fifteen days shy of his 94th birthday.