Prague, Dec 11 (CTK) – Czech documentary film director and scriptwriter Drahomira Vihanova, who belonged to the Czechoslovak New Film Wave of the 1960s, died on Sunday at the age of 87 years, Hana Stastna, from the dean’s office of the Film and TV School (FAMU) told CTK on Monday.
Vihanova, who graduated from FAMU, worked alongside film directors Jan Spata and Frantisek Vlacil. She was also a co-director of Otakar Vavra.
Her full-length feature film Squandered Sunday (Zabita nedele, 1968) drew a lot of attention, but it was banned due to its alleged hopelessness by Communist officials. It remained buried for the next twenty years until the collapse of Communism and had its distribution premiere in 1990 only.
During the 1950s, Vihanova cooperated with the music broadcasting of the Czechoslovak Television as a scriptwriter and assistant director.
She studied at FAMU in 1960-1965, majoring in feature film and editing.
Afterwards, she made films commissioned by the Kratky film (Short Film) production company and worked as Vavra’s assistant director Romance for Bugle (Romance pro kridlovku, 1966) and The Thirteenth Chamber (Trinacta komnata, 1968) films.
During the “normalisation” era, restoring the hard-line communist rule in the 1970s after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, she devoted her time to documentary film-making.
She directed documentaries Searching (Hledani, 1979) about Vlacil and The Transformation of My Friend Eva (Promeny pritelkyne Evy, 1990). After the 1989 Velvet Revolution, she made Everyday I Step In Front of Your Face (Denne predstupuji pred tvou tvar, 1992) documentary on a Sudeten German’s life in humility and religious faith.
Vihanova also collaborated with the Czechoslovak Television again in the 1990s.
From 1982, she was an external teacher of foreign students at FAMU.
She was presented with the Czech Lion Award in 2015 for extraordinary contribution to Czech cinematography and in 2016, she received an award for extraordinary contribution to world cinematography at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival.
