Estimated read time: Less than a minute
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
PRAGUE (AP) — Vojtech Jasny, a filmmaker who belonged to the new wave of Czechoslovak cinema in the 1960s, has died. He was 93.
Slovacke divadlo, a theatre he frequently visited, said that Jasny died Friday. A family representative confirmed his death to the CTK news agency.
From the 1950s, Jasny made some 50 movies in Czechoslovakia and later in the West when he emigrated after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia.
His most famous film, “All My Good Countrymen,” from 1968, about the brutal changes in the country under communism, was banned in his homeland. It won the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1969.
He also won a Cannes special jury prize for his 1963 film, “The Cassandra Cat.”
In the 1980s, Jasny settled in the United States, lecturing at Columbia University. He later returned home.
Jasny’s “Hell on Earth,” featuring testimonies of Holocaust survivors, was part of 2002’s “Broken Silence,” a five-film documentary project commissioned by Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
Jasny’s father was killed in the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz during World War II.
Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
