Tomáš Fassati

"The 1968 was fantastic in the freedom that we young people didn't appreciate then because we didn't experience the unfreedom. When you experience unfreedom at ten, you don't know what's going on, you just do what you want anyway, don't you. Nevertheless, we enjoyed it enormously and I founded what today would be called a society, but at that time it was a creative organisation of young photographers, filmmakers, theatre and art makers - it was called Dia-Film Prague. And so we just, like, in order to create some space where we could work, to put together some equipment that would serve us, etc. Plus those film crews or theatre crews, they're actually teams, right, it's not like a photographer, so it was good. And a lot of us, myself included, were terribly interested in making reports on public life at that time, so we did reports on the rich, varied cultural and political life."

"I was basically at that excited and obviously inexperienced age where people are just able to think they're going to change the world. And so at secondary school I organized a boycott of Russian language classes because it was the language of the occupiers. Because it was still in a period when more people dared to speak out against the occupiers, and it wasn't so visible for the communists, and of course there was... The first inventory was at the midterm school report. We didn't learn it, and when the Russian teacher called us to the blackboard to test us, because of course that's what you get a grade from, that's what you graduate from, that subject, we just stood up, we said, 'I am not learning the language of the occupiers,' and we sat down, we didn't go to the blackboard. The teacher didn't care and he wrote down a mark 5. We got a 5 in that half year, and we didn't fail yet, but by the end of the year it was getting serious. Half of us gave up to pass then, but half of us didn't give up and got kicked out of school."