2024-07-10 17:09:23
The monastery cellar in Boskovice, where the Festival for the Jewish Quarter is being held until Sunday, was filled with visitors to the talk with the artist Petr Sís this Saturday. One of the most famous Czech illustrators arrived from the USA, where he has been living for a long time. Seventy-five-year-old Sís recalled the beginnings of his career in America, where he initially focused on animated films. Only then did he break through with drawings.
According to him, Sís was moved by the interest of the people at the lecture. He doesn’t meet the Czech audience very much, as he said.
Petr Sís was born in 1949 in Brno. He grew up in Prague, where he became one of the first Czech DJs in the 1960s. In 1982, at the invitation of the Olympic Games Committee, he went to Los Angeles to film an animated jingle. “I got permission for three months. And when the Eastern Bloc countries decided to boycott the Summer Olympics, I was ordered to return. I wanted to finish the film and the return was delayed until I wasn’t allowed to return. But nobody liked my films and I didn’t know what I have work to do in LA,” recalled Sís in Boskovice.
He also devoted himself to drawing and was given the opportunity to create a poster for the film Amadeus by exiled director Miloš Forman. When he started to do a little better, he bought a car and went to the east coast of the USA, where he had contacts. “I started the life of an illustrator, which I didn’t even want to be in college. I drew for the New York Times, but my English was bad and sometimes I didn’t understand the content of the articles. This way, flawless pictures were created that were not even related to the text,” laughs the artist.
Today, in addition to illustrating, Sís also writes author’s books. Their heroes are often adventurers who plunge into life in their own way and against the expectations of those around them. For example, the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the naturalist Charles Darwin or Sís himself, who in the book The Wall talked about growing up in communist Czechoslovakia. In 2021, he published the publication Nicky & Věra, dedicated to the story of British Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved hundreds of Czech Jewish children from the Holocaust at the beginning of World War II.
“As a child, I remember my parents knowing people who were in a concentration camp or came to England by train, but it was never explained. When it started to be talked about, I started getting to know the stories. You realize how horrible it is to send a small child gone, when part of the country claimed that nothing was happening, and few had any intuition,” says Sís.
In England, he personally met one of the so-called Winton children, Lord Alfred Dubs, who later became a Labor politician and member of the British Parliament. He is 91 years old today. “I was surprised by what a fresh guy he was, very bright. He was always thinking about the future and saying: ‘After all, we are boys from Prague.’ I said I was from Brno, but he didn’t mind,” says Petr Sís, whose life was commemorated in a film a few years ago.
Despite his origins, he has not yet visited Boskovice, about 40 kilometers from Brno. “When I was younger, excited about English music and wanting to go to London, they told me to concentrate more on the treasures we have at home. I thought what they were telling me. But when I found myself across the ocean, I felt sorry many times , that I didn’t spend more time getting to know these places. I flew in from Paris on Friday, and as we drove through the countryside and the sun was setting, I was glad to be here,” he notes.
The number of people at the meeting surprised him. He does not often meet the Czech audience, which was exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and the move to online platforms. “It was extremely moving that people are willing to listen to me. Somewhere in the world they might say ‘nice pictures’, but when I meet people in the Czech Republic who like my work, they express such respect, they are more proud and as if they understand it better.” states Sís, who now lives near New York.
Other festival participants
This year’s 32nd edition of the Festival for the Jewish Quarter began last Thursday in Boskovice, Blanensko, and will culminate on Sunday evening. It offered sixty musicians from jazz to metal, a wide range of films, theater, exhibitions and discussions.
The concerts of the Slovak singer Katarzie, who combines folk with electronics and pop, or the Kafka Band were among the most popular. The organizers invited her on the occasion of this year’s 100th anniversary of the death of the writer Franz Kafka. “The Kafka Band processed Kafka’s book into an audiovisual form. The concert was an unprecedented success,” says dramaturg Antonín Kocábek.
Theater performance at Boskovice Castle. | Photo: CTK
The seven-member formation around artist Jaromír Švejdík, writer Jaroslav Rudiš and Dušan Neuwerth brought their latest album Proces to Boskovice, concluding a trilogy of recordings inspired by the literary work. “In general, they don’t play much in the Czech Republic, and they were supposed to be here already in 2021. This year, we finally managed to get them here, and people appreciated it beyond the standard,” notes the playwright.
The festival is spread over several parts of the city. The main music stages are located in the summer cinema, the manor house, the greenhouse and the castle. The organizers, the Unijazz association, also offer tickets for individual concerts or blocks. “That’s why we can’t always determine exactly how many people have arrived. It’s usually around 3,500 to 4,000. On Thursday, it looked like there were a little less people, but on Friday, on the contrary, significantly more than last year,” states Kocábek.
Czech musicians predominate, about a quarter are artists from abroad, for example from Germany or France.
In the summer cinema, the Bratislava-Berlin indie-pop group Tolstoys performed, for example, who in the past preceded Tom Odell or Lola Marsh. After the release of their second album, Mirror Me, from 2022, they appeared on the largest billboard in New York’s Times Square. Other performers included the post-punk band Lelee from Ljubljana and the Czech alternative rockers Manon Meurt. A rock trio from Amsterdam performing under the name Labasheeda performed on the stage in Manské dvor. Skleník traditionally belongs to the blues and jazz genres.
“In the 1990s, the festival was initially perceived as alternative, it was very underground. But the effort was to gradually break away from it and address a new group of visitors. We do not play completely mainstream, but for example on Saturdays we have rather noisier bands in Panské dvor and in on Sunday it will be more singers. The trend of recent years is rap, which is currently the most popular genre in society. We tend to have experimental things on smaller stages,” says Antonín Kocábek.
Visitors to the Festival for the Jewish Quarter in Boskovice view the local maior synagogue. | Photo: CTK
The festival is not only about music. At the Jewish Community House, the Israeli artist born in Kyiv, Zoya Cherkassky, is exhibiting, using her distinctive graphic visual style to depict the terrorist attacks at the Nova music festival or the hostage taking last October. Among other things, the film program offered the documentary film Tatabojs.doc directed by Marek Najbrt, which had its premiere in Karlovy Vary last week.
The festival was created in the 1990s to preserve and restore the Jewish quarter. The program also includes an annotated lecture by the neighborhood or concerts in the synagogue.