Vojtěch Jasný

Biography

Vojtěch Jasný (born 30 November 1925 – 15 November 2019) was a Czech director who came to prominence in the sixties. He won a Cannes Special Jury Prize for Až přijde kocour/The Cassandra Cat (1963). He was born in Kelč in Moravia.

An active filmmaker in Czechoslovakia throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he was among many artists and intellectuals who left the country after the USSR-led invasion following the Prague Spring of 1968. Jasný worked in other European countries for several years including Austria, West Germany and Yugoslavia until relocating to Brooklyn, New York in the early 1980s. Jasný taught film directing classes at Columbia University for several years (where his compatriot Miloš Forman was also a professor and former Film Division Co-Chair) and continues to teach at The School of Visual Arts (SVA) and The New York Film Academy (NYFA).

Až přijde kocour/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. The film won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes. Also among Jasný's works is Všichni dobří rodáci /All My Good Countrymen (1968), a story centering on the lives and fates of several rural Czechs as they struggle to adapt and survive under communist rule; a film later banned in Czechoslovakia after the invasion of 1968.