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.
Local school staple “Lost on a Mountain in Maine” from 1939 hits the big screen nationwide
Most Maine schoolchildren know about the boy lost for more than a week in 1939 after climbing the state's tallest mountain. Now the rest of the U.S. is getting in on the story.
Opening in 650 movie theaters on Friday, "Lost on a Mountain in Maine" tells the harrowing tale of 12-year-old Donn Fendler, who spent nine days on Mount Katahdin and the surrounding wilderness before being rescued. The gripping story of survival commanded the nation's attention in the days before World War II and the boy's grit earned an award from the president.
For decades, Fendler and Joseph B. Egan's book, published the same year as the rescue, has been required reading in many Maine classrooms, like third-grade teacher Kimberly Nielsen's.
"I love that the overarching theme is that Donn never gave up. He just never quits. He goes and goes," said Nielsen, a teacher at Crooked River Elementary School in Casco, who also read the book multiple times with her own kids.
Separated from his hiking group in bad weather atop Mount Katahdin, Fendler used techniques learned as a Boy Scout to survive. He made his way through the woods to the east branch of the Penobscot River, where he was found more than 30 miles (48 kilometers) from where he started. Bruised and cut, starved and without pants or shoes, he survived nine days by eating berries and lost 15 pounds (7 kilograms).
The boy's peril sparked a massive search and was the focus of newspaper headlines and nightly radio broadcasts. Hundreds of volunteers streamed into the region to help.
The movie builds on the children's book, as told by Fendler to Egan, by drawing upon additional interviews and archival footage to reinforce the importance of family, faith and community during difficult times,... Read More