Věra Chytilová

For her work, she received the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Czech Medal of Merit and the Czech Lion award.

Chytilová was born in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, on 2 February 1929. She had a strict Catholic upbringing, which would later come to influence many of the moral questions presented in her films. While attending college in Brno, Chytilová initially studied philosophy and architecture, but abandoned these fields. She then worked as a draftswoman, a fashion model and as a photo re-toucher before working as a clapper girl for the Barrandov Film Studios in Prague. She then sought a recommendation from Barrandov Film Studios to study film production, but was denied. Undeterred by the rejection, she would later be accepted into the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) at the age of 28, the first woman to study directing at the school. While attending FAMU, she studied underneath renowned film director Otakar Vavra, before graduating in 1962. Chytilová's dedication to her artistic vision manifested early in her studies, with her graduation film's screenplay, Strop/Ceiling, being rejected by her professor for its kitschy nature. After getting her classmate Pavel Juráček to rewrite the script for their professor's approval, she defiantly shot the original script.

Upon her graduation from FAMU, both of Chytilová's short films saw theatrical release throughout Czechoslovakia. In 1963, Chytilová released her first feature film entitled Something Different. Chytilová is best known for her once highly controversial film Sedmikrásky (Daisies; 1966). Daisies is known for its unsympathetic characters, lack of a continuous narrative, and abrupt visual style. Chytilová states that she structured Daisies to "restrict [the spectator's] feeling of involvement and lead him to an understanding of the underlying idea or philosophy". In 1966, Vera Chytilová’s Daisies was banned from screening in her home country of Czechoslovakia for over a year, due to the depictions of gross food waste at a time in which food shortages were plaguing the area. In the film, the two main characters, Marie I and Marie II, not only present the folly of bored, spoiled middle-class women, but also their own helplessness as young women devoured by a society that values them only as sexual objects and is, as they say, spoiled anyway. The characters justify their cathartic behavior to themselves saying ‘If the world is rotten, let us also be rotten’. Chytilová battled censorship of this film for her biting anti-corruption and consumption critiques, still managing to win the Grand Prix at the Bergamo Film Festival in Italy. The film would cement Chytilová’s film career, gaining public notoriety not just in her home country but around the world. After the Czechoslovak liberalization of 1968 led by Alexander Dubček, widespread reforms decentralized the government and lessened restrictions on the press, granting artists like Chytilová creative freedoms they previously did not possess. It was in this climate that Chytilová would begin working on her next film, Ovoce stromů rajských jíme (Fruit of Paradise; 1969), an experimental and psychedelic retelling of the story of Creationism, from an avant-garde, liberal perspective. After months of tense negotiation, the Soviet Union responded to the reformations by invading the CSR with the armies of the other Warsaw Pact nations and swiftly taking control of their government. The removal of Dubček marks the end of the Czech New Wave, as the Soviet Union not only rolled back the social reforms, but imposed even harsher restrictions on the press and centralized the government as a part of the Soviet Union. Chytilová and many others like her were forced to choose between filmmaking and their home country. Vera Chytilová was banned from filmmaking for seven years, still working under her husband's name until she was approached by the government, this time imploring her to make films for their state-run studio, Short Film Studios in 1976. Around the same time, she was invited to attend a newly assembled Year of Women film festival in the US that her government would not let her attend. The festival had asked to screen Daisies and Chytilová revealed that she had no uncensored prints of the film and that she was no longer allowed to make films. She was aware of two uncensored prints in Paris and Brussels, but neither were in her possession. As a result, the festival began applying international pressure on the Czechoslovak government by petitioning on Chytilová's behalf. With this pressure, Chytilová wrote a letter directly to President Gustáv Husák detailing her career and personal belief in socialism. Due to the success of the pressure campaign and Chytilová's appeal to President Husak, Chytilová began production of Hra o jablko (The Apple Game, 1976). The Apple Game was completed and subsequently screened at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and the Chicago International Film Festival, where it won the Silver Hugo. After the release of The Apple Game, Chytilová was allowed to continue making films but was continually met with controversy and heavy censorship by the Czechoslovak government. Věra Chytilová's last film was released in 2006, and she taught directing at FAMU. In 2026, materials relating to Chytilová's collaborations with Ester Krumbachová were made avalible online through the Ester Krumbachová Archive, including a 1990s unrealised project using the Maries characters of Daisies.

Like many Czech New Wave filmmakers, Chytilová was influenced by post-Stalin Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. Chytilová sought to display the hypocrisy of the government by presenting the complete opposite. Chytilová was anti-consumerist and called herself an individualist, rather than a feminist. Women star in almost all of Chytilová's films and ideas of gender, sex, and power are at the central idea of her films. Czech society was the primary focus of Chytilová's work, although the style of Czech New Wave filmmakers was to have international relevancy. Chytilová's films before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia were highly experimental, known for psychedelic colors and nonlinear editing. Daisies and Fruits of Paradise can be characterized by absurdism and surrealism. The color filters and other experimental tactics Chytilová used were exclusive to her films of the 1960s.

Chytilová was born in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, on 2 February 1929. She refused to leave Czechoslovakia after the Soviet Union Invasion of 1968 stating that "Making films then became a mission". She married cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera whom she met while attending FAMU. During the Soviet Union occupation, when Chytilová could not find work as a director, she and her husband built their family home and raised their children – an artist Tereza Kučerová (born 1964) and cinematographer Štěpán Kučera (born 1968). Chytilová died on 12 March 2014 in Prague, surrounded by her family, after long-term health issues.