František Vláčil

He did not study at any film school, was never part of any movement or wave, and developed his directorial style on instructional films made in the 1950s for the Czechoslovak Army Film. Yet with his short film Clouds of Glass and his debut The White Dove, he established himself as an original filmmaker with a distinctly visual and poetic signature. His most important films Devil's Trap, The Valley of the Bees, Adelheid and Marketa Lazarová were made during the 1960s in parallel with the best films of the New Wave. After an enforced pause during the normalisation period, when he was only able to make documentaries and films for young audiences, he returned to feature films in the mid-1970s with Smoke of the Potato Fields. And in 1978 he finally received recognition for his work at the Karlovy Vary IFF in the form of the Crystal Globe for Shadows of a Hot Summer. This February, František Vláčil would have turned 100 years old.