Freedom is the foundation on which people themselves have to build their future, take on their share of responsibility
Vladimír Oktavec was born on December 1, 1951 in Martin. His father František Oktavec, a managing editor of the Osveta publishing house, was in 1959 sentenced in a fabricated trial to seven years of imprisonment for subversion of the socialist system. Vladimír Oktavec graduated from the Viliam Pauliny-Tóth Grammar School in Martin in 1970. In 1968 he witnessed hectic events of the Warsaw Pact troops invasion in Martin. He continued his studies at the Faculty of Arts of the Comenius University in Bratislava, however, as he was inclined to theatre since his youth, after two years he transferred to study at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, where he graduated in 1976. After school, he became a member of the newly-founded theatre company Theatre for Children and Youth (today Ján Palárik Theatre) in Trnava. As an art-lover, along with other actors, during the normalization era he tended towards dissident ideas. After the outbreak of the Velvet Revolution in 1989 he and his colleagues became members of the movement Public Against Violence. He was also one of the main organizers of protest demonstrations in Trnava. Until 1992 he worked as an artistic director of the Trnava theatre.