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Jana Boková

Jana Boková

Directing

Biography

Boková (born in 1948) is a Czech film director. Born in Prague, she left Czechoslovakia at the time of the Soviet invasion in August 1968 to attend a conference of art students in Austria, then emigrated to Paris, France to study at the Sorbonne. She then lived in the United States and worked as a contributing photographer for Rolling Stone magazine, and subsequently became a film student at the National Film School in England debuting as a film director in 1975 with the critically acclaimed Militia Battlefield. She made films regularly for the BBC arts series Omnibus and Arena, winning many international awards. She wrote and directed the 1986 drama film Hôtel du Paradis, which was shown out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987. In 2001, Boková was approached by musician Eric Clapton to direct a music video, but ended up filming a feature-length documentary film called Eric Clapton and Friends which covered Clapton's band's rehearsals and preparations for a world tour. In 2003, the Cinémathèque Française hosted a complete retrospective of Boková's work. In 2012 Jana Bokova received a Czech award for cultural achievement.

Known For

Sunset People
8.0

Sunset Boulevard stretches 27 miles from Los Angeles’ Chinatown all the way to the ocean – a ride made famous by Philip Marlowe in the Chandler books. Film star mansions give way to tatty motels; exclusive offices stand alongside nightclubs with aspiring comics, and amateur nude contests. Then the famous ‘strip’ and Hollywood’s legendary coffee shop, Schwabs, where (they say) a girl in a tight sweater turned into Lana Turner. Meet some of Sunset’s most colourful and improbable residents – the failed showbiz impresario who made his millions selling cookies, and the high-rise developer who let John Wayne take his cow up in the lift… the lucky ones have achieved a peculiarly Hollywood brand of success, but every day on Sunset you meet the other ones: still looking for a break, for a job, for a deal. All of them still trying to play their part in the Hollywood dream.

Sunset People

1984Movie
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A film about people and the space in which they live. From country cottage to council flats, stately detached houses, railway arches and tiny bedsitters - this is a journey with the camera through living rooms of all sizes, designed in all kinds of taste. It's a journey, too, through the lives of the people who inhabit these rooms; a film producer who lives in an empty house with bare walls and floor, a young Gloucestershire couple who have filled every inch of space with mementoes of their life together, an artist's model whose walls are crammed with paintings of herself, an architect who lives in a bedsit one-and-a-half metres square. Couples, families and single people appear in this film, some happy and secure within their living space, others lonely, or simply alone.

Living Room

1978Movie