Miroslav Janek

Miroslav Janek (b. 1954, Náchod, Czechoslovakia) began as an amateur filmmaker. In 1980 he emigrated to the United States where he worked with a number of documentarists (e.g. Godfrey Reggio); he has worked back in his homeland since the mid-1990s. He enjoyed great success with his film about sight-impaired photographers The Unseen (1996 – Best Documentary Film ex aequo at KVIFF). Janek’s extensive filmography of documentaries presented at KVIFF includes Battle for Life (2000, codir. Roman Vávra and Vít Janeček), Crimson Sails (2001), Kha-chee-pae (2005), Citizen Havel (2008), and The Confessions of Kateryna K. (2008). KVIFF also screened his portraits of director Drahomíra Vihanová (Burning, 2012), Olga Havlová (Olga, 2014), and Vratislav Brabenec (The Gospel According to Brabenec, 2014), as well as the documentary Film Spa (2015), shot for KVIFF’s 50th jubilee.