Eighty years ago, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the second-oldest festival in the world, screened its first films. Originally organized by two spa towns—Mariánské Lázně and Karlovy Vary—the festival ran from August 1-15 in 1946. Since that modest edition, which showed 13 feature films, the festival has grown permanently in Karlovy Vary, beginning in 1950, to honor cinema’s biggest luminaries, ranging from Peter O’Toole to Dakota Johnson.
Their upcoming interaction, therefore, is a time for celebration.
This year, the 80th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, which will run July 3-11, will commemorate the festival’s rich past via a few key events and activities, starting with a sneak preview screening in Mariánské Lázně, which, for one day, will reunite the festival’s original twin sites.
The festival will also have two exhibitions. One will be a photographic record of the festival’s history, located along a path between the Grandhotel Pupp (which is said to have inspired Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel”) and the Hotel Thermal (KVIFF’s primary hub). The second display will be a tribute to the now-deceased 1st President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel.
Along with those components, KVIFF will redesign the Hotel Thermal’s Grand Hall and make The No Barriers project—a charitable organization that provides services to disabled visitors—this year’s Official Nonprofit Partner.
The programming of KVIFF’s “Out of the Past” section will also acknowledge the festival’s anniversary by screening a few favorites from the prior eight decades. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “A Matter of Life and Death,” which fittingly premiered in 1946, will be shown. As will Ken Loach’s affecting coming-of-age movie “Kes,” Mexican auteur Emilio Fernández’s 1948 KVIFF entrant “Río Escondido,” Konrad Wolf’s main prize winner “Lissy,” Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’ KVIFF Grand Prix winner “The Defendant,” and Juraj Jakubisko’s “Birds, Orphans and Fools.”
Nevertheless, the most tantalizing selection among the retrospective screenings is Cecil Holmes’ previously lost film “Captain Thunderbolt,” which screened at the 7th KVIFF in 1952. A seminal film in Australian film history, the action-western features Grant Taylor as the titular bushranger who’s hunted by a vindictive trooper (Harp McGuire). For decades, the film only existed as a 16mm, 53-minute TV print held by the Australian National Film and Sound Archive. That is, until a full version was discovered in 2024 in the Czech National Film Archive.
More films joining the “Out of the Past” section will be announced at the beginning of June.
Separately, Karlovy Vary will also screen a digitally restored version of Czech master Věra Chytilová’s “Tainted Horseplay” (or “A Hoof Here, a Hoof There”). While Chytilová’s best-known films are the manic feminist extravaganza “Daisies” and the sensual Biblical allegory “Fruit of Passion,” “Tainted Horseplay” is a lesser-seen film from her (it must be noted that it was the Czech Republic’s submission to the 62nd Academy Awards). Like her best work, the picture mixes sexual adventuring with tragicomedy elements, but this time with a new bracing element: one character has recently learned they’re HIV positive. That revelation brought Chytilová into conversation with contemporary concerns, back when discussing the virus, particularly in film, was still taboo in 1989.
Apart from the films, KVIFF will also present actress Magda Vášáryová with the President’s Award. Vášáryová not only starred in the aforementioned “Birds, Orphans and Fools,” but she’s also one of the great Slovak actresses and an ode to the shared history of the Czech Republic and Slovenia (formerly Czechoslovakia). Awarding Vášáryová might be the most fitting way to honor this prestigious festival’s eighty-year history.
