Among pop-up bars, bandstands and opulent, 19th century spa buildings painted in sherbet pastels, the Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival (KVIFF) takes place each year in July, at the halfway mark between Cannes and Venice. For those weirdos among us who make a chunk of our living running the gauntlet of summer festivals, the Czech event is a fixture, and for me, personally, as my longest continually attended festival, it is something of a home away from home. I had the pleasure of sitting on the Crystal Globe competition jury last year, and look forward to returning this time in no small part because the festival will celebrate its 60th edition (and it’s 80-year legacy as it was founded in 1946), with a program that was designed, as artistic director Karel Och says, “in a spirit of humility. We look back at the festival’s history and want to honor the work of our predecessors.”
Despite its youthful energy — the festival actively promotes student attendance, with a camp site nearby and the constant thrum of live music outdoors — this sense of stability and continuity is central to the KVIFF experience. Och himself, who took the reins in 2010, is only the fest’s third artistic director. And when the fest’s beloved Jiří Bartoška passed away in May of last year, it was announced that, even posthumously, he will remain KVIFF president, a position he had held since 1994. Prior to the Bartoška era, there were some rocky periods under communism, but even then, organizers fought for artistic independence despite state censorship. Och recounts how, “in 1970, just two years after Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, Ken Loach’s ‘Kes’ won the festival.”
The festival has a strong track record in retrospectives and will this time dedicate its Out of the Past sidebar to a hand-picked selection of KVIFF’s historical highlights, including “Kes,” as well as “Barravento” (1961), a pioneering work of the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement from director Glauber Rocha. And “A Matter of Life and Death,” by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger — which played at the second-ever edition — will also be shown because, says Och, “Any reason to screen this wonderful film is good enough for me.”
Perhaps the highest compliment for any festival is that its filmmakers tend to be repeats. Northern Irish director Mark Cousins, who won the Crystal Globe in 2024 for “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things,” brings the world premiere of episodes 7 and 8 of “The Story of Documentary Film” to the special screenings section, having premiered previous installments in Sundance, Berlin and Cannes. And the Crystal Globe competition also features KVIFF returnees: Bulgarian duo Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov, who won top honors in 2019 for “The Father,” are back with tragicomedy “Black Money for White Nights,” while Czech filmmaker Šimon Holý (“Chica Checa”) and Cypriot director Tonia Mishiali (“The Lion at my Back”) are both promoted into the Crystal Globe fray, having previously featured in the second competition.
But one cannot rely on old friends and past glories alone, and Och also mentions atypical competitors, films from Colombia (“Five Years, Four Months”), Myanmar (“Fruit Gathering”) and the first-ever Swiss entry (“A Happy Family”). And support for MENA filmmakers continues with Lebanese director Karim Kassem’s genre hybrid “Pipes” and “Hijamat,” produced and edited by Jafar Panahi, and directed by Panahi’s frequent co-writer Nader Saeivar.
One of the bigger shifts in KVIFF’s evolution occurred in 2022, when the long-running East of the West competition was replaced by Proxima, a new section without geographic restrictions. It’s a change that Och affirms has taken root. “People — producers, sales agents — do, I believe, understand the type of films we’re looking for: a certain youthful spirit, be it in the movies of young filmmakers or seasoned filmmakers who change course and go for something different … One of the reasons we decided to abandon East of the West,” he continues, “was to give more opportunities to filmmakers from Asia and Latin America.” This is borne out by this year’s Proxima competition, which includes movies from India (“The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb”), Japan (“Incinerator”), Argentina (“Truck Driver”) and Mexico (“Against Nature”).
Indeed, when pressed about overarching themes that emerged during the programming process this year, crossing borders is much on Och’s mind. “We have, more than usual, films directed by filmmakers not in the countries where they were born or where they grew up … So you have two Italians in the Proxima competition doing films in England [“Rain Catcher”] or in Cambodia [“Homo Cive Natura”]. So that might be about the world getting smaller, or more accessible, with filmmakers being able to travel to find financing, to be more inventive and more daring.”
Another trend is women being centered in many of these narratives, regardless of the gender of the director. “We see many female heroes, be it individual or a duo, maybe having an improbable connection. And these films are often, or at least equally, directed by men and women.” Both these trends — filmmakers working outside their native countries, and male directors centering stories of women and female friendships — were also prevalent in the Cannes selection, as was a third, much-remarked-on phenomenon: the comparative lack of U.S. titles. But Och maintains that “we did get submissions from the U.S., and we did watch most of the American films at Sundance, but we did not find a suitable candidate for the competition.”
However, he says, “We did find candidates for our non-competitive program. And maybe this is an opportunity to voice something, and that is that independent films from the United States are more and more often being subjected to strategies which used to be dedicated to bigger, more commercial films, in terms of holdbacks. I am talking specifically about ‘Josephine,’ which played in Sundance and Berlin. We invited ‘Josephine’ — we even acquired it for local distribution — but we were told that there won’t be any screenings of the film allowed during the summer … an extremely frustrating tendency which is seriously harming the summer festivals as the launching pads for local distribution.”
Still, the U.S. no-show will scarcely affect the official selection, which, as ever, balances international titles with more local projects. Och insists that the Czech and Slovak films competing are anything but token inclusions. “We are not a national institute. We shouldn’t be expected to promote local cinema at any cost. We want to present films that we consider interesting, not just for the Czech Republic, but for foreign viewers as well. And I have to mention last year’s winner that did very well,” he continues, referencing the 2025 Crystal Globe winner, Miro Remo’s Czech-Slovak documentary “Better Go Mad in the Wild,” which received invitations from over 60 international festivals following its win.
So it is fitting that when I ask Och to overcome his diplomatic scruples and give us a personal program highlight, he should again namecheck a local production. “’Only Beautiful Things to Look At,’ which is directed by Ivan Ostrosky, describes a very dark part of recent Czechoslovak history … It’s a very, very beautiful film which I dare to predict will have a very strong international career.”
A regional breakout would be a bonus for KVIFF60, but whatever happens, the festival’s unpretentious, convivial spirit is unlikely to flag — one kind of summed up in the wonderful “Better Go Mad in the Wild,” when one of its twin-brother subjects, pondering the lofty question of his legacy, settles on “I’ll just say it was nice to be here with you.”
