Director, actor, scriptwriter and journalist. After graduating from grammar school he attended technical university but did not complete his studies. He subsequently took many different jobs including labourer on a duck farm, and scene shifter, prompter and actor in various provincial theatres. Since 1982 he has worked as an actor and director at HaDivadlo, one of the leading alternative theatre companies. He regularly collaborates with other alternative theatrical companies, such as Husa na Provázku in Brno and Prague’s Archa theatre. From 1990 to 1994 he taught at the Academy of Performing Arts.in Brno. Since 1992 he has had his own regular radio show Břetislav Rychlík’s Used-Book Store . In 1993, he was awarded the Quails Prize for achievements in journalism. In 1994, he was a prizewinner in the European Feuilleton competition. From 1997 to the end of 2000 he worked as a script editor for Czech Television in Brno (working on 40 episodes of the series Intolerance?), where he raised such issues as racism, domestic violence, battered children, ecology, human intolerance, etc. Since the second half of the 1990s he his devoted himself almost exclusively to his own documentary films, writing and writing the scripts for such films as “Oh, you black bird”, “The Valachian Dreamer”, “Golden Brothers”, “The Seven Elements of Ludvík Kundera”, “Painted Swain”, , “Distant Worlds”, People Seeking People”, “In the Global Bazaar”, “Marie, Mařa, Mařka, Maryša”, “Motorway”, “Ravens Are Songbirds Too”, as well as a series of 60-minute documentaries about non-conformist artists “Close-up” (Jáchym Topol Jiří Kratochvil, Ivan Wernisch, Jan Steklík, and the gypsy musican Jozka Kubík). He has received many awards at home and abroad (Moscow, Warsaw, Academia Film Olomouc, the main Pierrot Prize, and a commendation from FITES). His documentary film about the lives of seven elderly people in the Slovak White Carpathian mountains “One Year” was awarded one of the main prizes at the Kraków Festival in 1999 and in the same year the Vox Humana prize awarded to the artist who in a given year has shown the greatest moral and artistic endeavour in promoting the idea of humanisation in the world we live in.
Czech Republic