My Time at The Karlovy Vary Film Festival

When I first attended the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) in 1992 I was living in Berlin, where I had a working visa as I was married to a German. When I travelled to Karlovy Vary by train, the guards at the Czechoslovakian border asked me for my visa and when I didn’t have one they removed me from the train, amiably asking me for 70 Deutschmarks. Once in Karlovy Vary I had to report to the police station and kept doing so until my departure. It was during this time that Slovakia split from what became the Czech Republic, so it was an interesting time.

Aki Kaurismaki was at the festival and our interview took place in the morning at a bar overlooking the festival as we imbibed the local beverage Becherovka. I also started a long friendship with Icelandic director Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, after our interview drinking the famed local brew, Pilsner Urquell.

I returned to the festival in 1996 when Vaclav Havel was the first Czech President and he made his presence felt. I had dinner on several occasions with Zentropa co-founder, Peter Aalbaek Jensen, who was there with Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. I also interviewed Ari Folman for his film Saint Clara and the Israeli director went on to have a huge hit with 2008’s Waltz with Bashir. So KVIFF is good at unearthing talent.

At the end of the 1996 festival I ran into an Australian friend whose father was Czech and she was living in Prague, working for a France-based global bank. She suggested I return the next year, not only to attend the festival but to stay with her in Prague, which I did. Many of her Prague-based buddies, writers and bankers and general bohemians, most of whom were Anglos, ventured to the festival looking for a good time. By day the bankers may have been handling the economies of the small eastern nations, but at night they were ready to party.

So too were many festival attendees and I recall one night walking the historic Karlovy Vary neighbourhood with American actor Jeffrey Wright who was amazed by the city’s beauty.

This year Dakota Johnson compared Karlovy Vary to Disneyland and with its incredibly restored hotels and spas, it’s certainly a beautiful location to hold a film festival. Karlovy Vary still remains a party city with many young viewers looking for a good time as well.

Jiri Bartoska, one of the country’s most famous actors and a very funny, accessible man, had been the festival’s president from 1995 and remained involved with the festival until his death in May this year. The festival’s opening film, We’ve Got to Frame It, is essentially a 2021 conversation with him and had local audiences in stitches. A national hero and the kind of man everyday Czechs adored, he had huge crowds turn out for his funeral.

It was fitting too that this year Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard should receive an honorary Crystal Globe for outstanding contribution to world Cinema, given that his international breakthrough had been in Breaking the Waves, which had been such a big deal at KVIFF. He now looks set for an Oscar nomination for Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value.

So how has the festival changed since I first attended in the post-communist 1990s? Then it was a bohemian event, perhaps haphazard in its organisation and it struggled to survive over the years. Now with corporate sponsorship it has become a behemoth for world cinema, while continuing to draw particular attention to cinema from eastern Europe. The parties are bigger and the city has been entirely renovated into a tourist hub. Still my early days there were a lot of fun too. And they were probably more relaxed, with more mingling with the film talent in an informal manner.

Helen Barlow
©FIPRESCI 2025