"One day when we came home for the summer, my husband and my children got a passport to go back to Cuba. You had to surrender it when you arrived. And I was wondering what he was going to do there with those two kids, like, if he had to work. And they wouldn't let me in because we were having a party. Laco Deczi was playing the trumpet there, and he had a concert, and there was an American journalist there, and then we had a party at our place, of course. And the American journalist was there too. And they wouldn't give me a passport because I was socializing with a foreigner. And I stood up and said that I hadn't signed anything, that I wouldn't associate with foreigners. Tell that to my husband and his editor, they signed that they would not associate with foreigners. I don't know who turned me in, but I invited them, that's the truth. I didn't sign anything saying I wouldn't associate with strangers. And then they let me go, but it was kind of funny."
"I made a feature film and then a couple of documentaries, it was considered a pretty good start. I was kind of young and talented until someone asked me to join the party. I said I didn't need to, because I had a good enough communist pedigree, and I still laughed at that, I shouldn't have done that. I'd already done Shorts [Short Film], I was pretty well off, so to speak, and then I didn't bother. Then I worked for a long time in the music department behind the camera, because Professor Bojanovsky was one of the few people who threw the note that they shouldn't give me work in the trash. But then it was like..." - " I guess the situation depended on the people, whether they threw something in the trash or not." - "In those sixties, before the Allied troops came, we knew which direction we were going in and what we were aiming for. And we were actually going, all the right ones were in the same corridor. And then when it came to the moment of truth, the characters just came out and some went there, some went there and some stood in the middle. It was clear, you just had to express yourself there. I don't mind so much if someone was in the Communist Party, because first of all there were a lot of true believers who really believed in it, but I mind the State Security officers. They bother me a lot because I don't think you can justify it anymore by believing that communism is the right thing to do, or the direction that the communists prescribed for us. That's where it's really bullshit."
"I was twenty-three years old in 1968. It was in the summer, I was in Bratislava, I was working in television, and at three in the morning my mother woke me up and said, 'Hey, you have to go to work.' And I said, 'Oh no, I have the day off today!' 'No, you have to, you live the closest.' And she just drove me out, my mother, a die-hard communist, drove me out to work. And I was there for two days" - "What happened in Bratislava?" - "I had a new orange skirt, they shot me in the ass when I went. But otherwise, we worked in that TV station just like here, as long as we could. We carried the boxes and the films that somebody brought in. And we were basically broadcasting as long as we could" - "How do you think they were shooting?" - " As long as the house wasn't full of Russian soldiers, they were broadcasting. "And what did you say they were shooting?" - "We ran out to buy something, to take something away, the television is in the square and there was shooting. A few people died there, in the square."
Cameraman, director, interpreter and politician Mgr. Jessica Horváthová was born on 22 July 1946 in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, where her father Július Horváth was a diplomat. He was of Hungarian Slovak origin and his wife, Martha Messler Horváth, was a German Moravian. Both parents joined the resistance during World War II and participated in the Slovak National Uprising. In the 1950s, her father was sentenced to thirteen and a half years in prison in connection with the political trial of Rudolf Slánský (he was released after six years). Jessika Horváthová graduated from the Secondary Art School in Brno and in 1965 she entered FAMU in Prague. She successfully completed her studies in 1970. Between 1970 and 1975 she made mostly documentaries. After that she was forbidden to work in the field. In 1971 she married her colleague Miroslav Kren, with whom she had two children. In 1980-1984 she lived with her family in Cuba, where her husband got a job as a cameraman for Czechoslovak Television. She then worked as a translator and interpreter from Serbo-Croatian and as an assistant director at the Barrandov Film Studio. In 1990 she founded first an acting agency and later the casting studio CINE-JESSY. In 2005 she married for the second time to actor and politician Jiří Stanislav, chairman of the Czech National Socialist Party. The following year she joined the same party and became actively involved in politics. In 2023 she was living in Prague.
