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Slovak director, screenwriter and cinematographer Juraj Jakubisko, who won more than 80 international film awards, has died at the age of 84 in Prague, according to Film New Europe.

Jakubisko, who was given the nickname “the Fellini of the East“ due to his visual originality and magical realism, was born on April 20, 1938 in the eastern Slovak village of Kojšov. He studied photography at a secondary school for applied arts in Bratislava, and graduated in film directing from Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (Famu) in Prague.

He began winning international acclaim with his experimental short films even before his directorial feature debut with “Crucial Years” (Kristove roky) (1967). The films “The Deserter and the Nomads” (Zbehovia a pútnici) (1968), which won the Little Lion award for young artist at the Venice Film Festival, “Birds, Orphans and Fools” (1969), and the tragicomedy “See You in Hell, Friends” were banned in the 1970s,...

The French New Wave was not the only new wave of the 1960s: during a temporary loosening of the Communist regime’s hold on culture, Czechoslovakia had its own new wave that produced films just as beautiful, witty, exciting, innovative and thought-provoking as the French. The 1960s saw two Czechoslovak winners of the foreign language Oscar: The Shop on Main Street in 1965 and Closely Observed Trains in 1967. Like the French New Wave filmmakers, Czech New Wave directors such as Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová and Jan Němec were well-versed in film history. Although Communism had restricted their access to more recent international trends in film, philosophy, politics, art and literature, during the 1960s Czechoslovak students, artists and intellectuals had greater access to contemporary movements and ideas and embraced them enthusiastically. The country was also able to reconnect with its own artistic and cultural past, formerly repressed by Communism: one major example is the work of Kafka,...