Juraj Jakubisko

Juraj Jakubisko (30 April 1938 – 24 February 2023) was a Slovak film director. He directed fifteen feature films, between 1967 and 2008. He often took on the dual role of cinematographer, and is often also credited as a screenplay writer as he usually co-writes or writes the scripts of his movies. In 2000 he was named Best Slovak Director of the 20th century by film critics and journalists. His work is often described as magical realism. Career Before entering the film industry, Jakubisko taught still photography at a secondary school for applied arts in Bratislava, and worked for a television company in Košice. In 1960 he moved to Prague where he attended the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU), studying film direction under Václav Wasserman. He graduated in 1965 and began working with Alfréd Radok at the Laterna Magika theatre in Prague. He began winning international acclaim with his experimental short films before making his first feature Crucial Years () in 1967. This film won a FIPRESCI award and a Josef von Sternberg Award in Mannheim, Germany. His next film, Deserters and Pilgrims, won the Little Lion award for young artists at the Venice Film Festival. Jakubisko's career was heavily impacted by political events in Czechoslovakia, with his work facing censorship in the period following the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion in response to the Prague Spring. During the "normalization" period which followed, he made a few documentaries, but no major feature films. He filmed Three Sacks of Cement and a Live Rooster () in 1976, but it was not released until 1978. Jakubisko returned to feature film-making in 1979 with Build a House, Plant a Tree (), which was nonetheless banned for its anti-regime messages, but not before it received a positive reception at a film festival in Amsterdam. The success in Amsterdam proved invigorating for Jakubisko's work, leading to a fertile period, culminating in the 1983 epic The Millennial Bee (). This movie was a huge success, selling out cinemas for many weeks after its release and winning awards at film festivals in Seville and Venice. The film was later named the best film of the 1980s by Czechoslovakian journalists.