Juraj Jakubisko

Juraj Jakubisko (born 30 April 1938, Kojšov, Czechoslovakia current Slovakia) is a Slovak film director. In his movies he managed to catch life's most beautiful colors, unhide the poetry behind the ordinary and to be ahead of his time without forgetting his roots. “In Jakubisko films the irrational, mysterious and sensational seems to be as natural as the life itself, although not all of us are able to have Jakubisko ́s eye, enabled to see that mysterious, unexpected and fantastic even in simple ordinary daily life“ - Federico Fellini. Thanks to his typical handwriting, full of allegory, fantasy and visionary imagination, about Jakubisko is written as about an artist, who with his magical realism in this part of the world means in the film the same, what Gabriel García Márquez in the literature of the Latin America. Juraj Jakubisko attracts the international attention thanks to his experimental films.

He is currently based in Prague.

Before entering the film industry, Jakubisko taught still photography at a Bratislava secondary school for applied arts and worked for a television in Košice. In 1960 he moved to Prague where he attended the FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts), studying direction under Václav Wasserman's tuition. He graduated in 1965. After his studies Jakubisko worked with Alfréd Radok at the Laterna magika theater in Prague and began winning international acclaim with his experimental short films before making his first feature Crucial Years or Christ's Years (Kristove roky, 1967).

The promising career of the young director was heavily crippled by the communist regime. He managed to complete only 3 films before he was sidetracked in the difficult period following the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion which crushed the Prague Spring reform period in Czechoslovakia. During that period, he made a few documentaries. Fortunately the situation got gradually better so that he could film Three Sacks of Cement and a Live Rooster (Tri vrecia cementu a živý kohút, 1976) although it was not released until 1978.

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Wikipedia