The comparatively unknown Czech director Vojtěch Jasný managed to earn a few industry award nominations for his nostalgic 1968 film All My Good Countrymen. The film is set in a small Moravian village in the immediate postwar years. The “countrymen” of the title look forward to freedom after nearly a decade of Nazi rule. But once more, Czech freedom has been swapped in the name of diplomacy, and now the Moravians must deal with the communists. Not surprisingly, All My Good Countrymen was banned the moment that Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968. —www.blockbuster.com
Vojtěch Jasný (Born in Kelč in Moravia November 30, 1925) is 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).1
An active and influential 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 ’80’s. 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).
Až přijde kocour/The Cassandra Cat, one of Jasny’s most popular films, is an allegorical fable about a magical cat that comes to a small Czech… read more
mandatory viewing for the new breed of commie revisionists: a film about the innocent beginnings of communist utopia - murder, fraud, theft, promotion of illiteracy, "healthy roots" segregation, blackmail, forced collectivization, "class enemy" paranoia - all packaged in a soft, meandering, almost casual portrayal that unfolds lavishly, non-ideologic in its depiction of whole chunks of life. Ideology is present in a
most diffuse way, brought up accidentally, melt into the very tissue of existence, spreading evanescent tentacles like ink in water. Feather snow, masked dancers departing in the snow, fields like blonde braids, birds on upright twigs scattered with the tactile sensitivity of fingers on an organ ...
