Czech filmmaker Jiri Sequens, 85
Posted: Sunday, April 20th, 2008 7:44 pmCzech film-maker, known for his skill on location work, whose worked was often themed around wartime Nazi attrocities
Jirí Sequens built a long and successful career as a film director by wedding the dictates of Fifties-style heroic social realism to the dramatic requirements of slick, engrossing action. His location-shot thrillers and war films culminated in Assassination (1964), a vivid widescreen re-creation — five years in preparation — of the wartime assassination in occupied Prague of Czechoslovakia’s brutal Nazi overlord Reinhard Heydrich and the ferocious reprisals that followed.
Born in Brno, he acted on stage and radio while still a student, graduating in 1946 from the drama department of Brno Conservatoire. He learnt film-making in Moscow under Eisenstein and Gerasimov, and following military service was stage manager at the E. F. Burian Theatre in Prague, then head of the State Film Theatre in Prague before writing and directing his first short film in 1949. His first feature, Happy Journey (1951), was a typical propaganda piece of that era about a young woman assisting in the collectivisation of private farms in her village. …
Jirí Sequens, writer-director, was born on April 23, 1922. He died on January 21, 2008, aged 85 … Read full obituary
