Jan Prochazka (1929-1971) was of Moravian farmers' stock and an enthusiastic functionary of the Communist Youth Organisation, a builder of collective farms. His first book of reports describing this milieu was a disaster. After this failure he was silent for years; his next book published in 1960 won him a literary prize.
        Prochazka soon started to write film scenarios. The first film he made with Kachyna, Fetters (Pouta, 1961), was not a great success but soon after that they started a remarkable series of lyrical films about young girls growing up. The most successful of them was Suffering (Trapeni, 1961).
        In the 1960s, Kachyna started to co-operate with writer and scriptwriter Jan Prochazka, with whom he made his best work, which is related to early production of the New Wave. These features lose the epic and dramatic dimension, and psychology, lyricism and emotional features come to the fore. These films of the early 1960s—Trapeni (Suffering, 1961), Zavrat (Vertigo, 1962) and Vysoka zed (The High Wall, 1964)—and principally about emotional maturation.