Karlovy Vary Film Festival Celebrates 80 Years of Cinematic Excellence

In 1946, 15 years before Alain Resnais made “Last Year at Marienbad,” one of the world’s earliest film festivals unspooled in the Czech spa towns of Marianske Lazne — aka “Marienbad” — and Karlovy Vary — aka “Carlsbad.”

Tucked in beautiful Bohemia, Karlovy Vary had already made cinema history 50 years before that, in 1896, when a representative of the Lumiere’s pioneering film firm demonstrated the groundbreaking new le cinematographe Lumiere projector, one of a few in the world, at the spa’s popular casino.
These aren’t historical facts intended to impress the reader with the importance of the Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival.

We’ll get to that in a minute.

These are a couple of cultural moments in the ancient spa town’s rich history with the arts.
This illustrious “spa town of the royals and nobles” past helps explain why Karlovy Vary became one of the two most important film festivals — along with Moscow — in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe and Russia.

After World War II, the Russians called the shots on every aspect of life in the Soviet Bloc and the storied Czechoslovakian resort town was chosen to alternate with Moscow every other year as the socialist paradise’s official film showcase.

Lots of important international film artists introduced their films in Karlovy Vary during that period, especially when the left-wing politics of the filmmakers was in sync with the Communist hosts.
Karlovy Vary hosted the 1954 international premiere of American radical helmer Herbert J. Biberman’s landmark film “Salt of the Earth,” penned by no less a literary luminary than “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Place in the Sun” scribe Michael Wilson.

Back in the Cold War days, being blacklisted in America made you a hot ticket behind the Iron Curtain.
Thanks in part to the spectacular success and global acclaim for the Czech New Wave filmmakers in the 1960s, Karlovy Vary became a popular stop for international cinema auteurs such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tony Richardson, Glauber Rocha and Martin Ritt.

One of the mainstays of Czech cinema in that era was the winner of the 1966 foreign-language film Oscar (as it was then called), Jan Kadar, for “The Shop on Main Street.”

Two years earlier, in 1964, Kadar had won the Karlovy Vary top prize, the Crystal Globe, for his thriller “Accused.”

That year is a demonstration of the festival’s programming savvy in the ’60s: Luis Buñuel’s “Diary of a Chambermaid” was in competition, alongside Mikio Naruse’s “A Woman’s Life,” Swiss maestro Alain Tanner’s first feature, “The Apprentices,” Phillipe de Broca’s international breakthrough, “That Man From Rio,” and Franklin Schaffner’s “The Best Man.”

Czech New Wave legend Jiří Menzel, who earned the foreign-language Oscar in 1968 for “Closely Watched Trains,” scored the Crystal Globe that year for his film “Capricious Summer.” Ken Loach, Richard Brooks and Stanley Kramer were among the notable filmmakers also in competition.

But that moment in the sun came crashing down when the Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, and while Karlovy Vary endured, its return to splendor was delayed until 1989, when the Iron Curtain fell, freeing the region from Moscow rules.

In 1994, the newly privatized festival was revitalized by Czech theater and film star Jiří Bartoška. A new era began, characterized by the attendance of major filmmakers, big international stars, as well as another contingent that continues to define Karlovy Vary up to today: The kids.

This is when I first attended the Karlovy Vary fest, and first saw what savvy management and informed film curation, thanks in those early years to chief program director Eva Zaoralová, could do to bring together energetic film fans and daring global film creatives.

The movie star names are too many to list here, but they include Hollywood icons such as Robert Redford, Mel Gibson, Sharon Stone, Gregory Peck, Robert DeNiro, Johnny Depp, Susan Sarandon, Michael Douglas, Renee Zellweger, Michael Caine, Uma Thurman, Robert Pattinson and Julianne Moore.
The stellar American film industry interface that began that year was in no small measure due to a key member of the Karlovy Vary management team, U.S. representative Tatiana Detlofson, who began her tenure in 1994. A longtime international film publicist, awards consultant and AMPAS member, Detlofson’s roots in KV couldn’t be deeper: it’s the town of her birth and childhood. She still has her Communist Pioneer Youth Party pin somewhere to prove it.

I don’t know the names of the tens of thousands of young students and cinephiles who bring the festival to vibrant life every year with their passion for films of all kinds and from all places, but I do know they’re the key to the presence of so many major stars and auteurs.

When Gibson showed his film “Apocalypto” to 1,200 mostly young film lovers in the main auditorium, he was so taken by their enthusiasm and engagement that he blew off dinner with the Czech president to stay and talk moviemaking.

Ask anyone who’s attended the Karlovy Vary festival over the past three decades about their experiences there and I’m betting you hear a variation of this typical evening.

It’s about the connection between attentive, eager young fans and film artists who get a kind of honesty and energy that is quite rare today — most of the high-caliber international fests have lost this kind of casual intimacy mixed with elegance that Karlovy Vary thrives on.

One year, as I walked along the Tapla River as it flowed gently through the charming fairy-tale center of town, I spotted legendary Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami having a bit of wienerschnitzel all by his lonesome at an outdoor cafe.

He invited me to sit down and we chatted for a good 20 minutes or so and I excused myself so the great man could enjoy his strudel without the distraction of a garrulous fan.

These kinds of encounters become an everyday occurrence at the festival. One minute you’re singing Coasters songs with Morgan Freeman, and the next you’re watching John Cleese devour an entire roast duck.

One summer day, I watched a young Leonardo DiCaprio crawl into the loving arms of his German grandparents on a bench in a Karlovy Vary park.

For about 20 years, my newspaper, Variety, partnered with European Film Promotion and the festival, curating an official section first called Variety Critics Choice and celebrating emerging Euro helmers. This segued into Future Frames, showcasing student cinema across the continent.

So the festival has played an incredibly important role in the mission of Variety, providing the Bible of Showbusiness with decades of access to important world filmmakers, while also keeping us up to date on the filmmaking scene in Eastern Europe.

It’s been a remarkable journey for this essential cultural event of Eastern Europe. Karlovy Vary was born in the 1940s under oppression, helped showcase unstoppable talents in the 1960s, who were then suppressed. It suffered under Soviet oppression in the 1970s and ’80s — but I was first there as it emerged in the early ’90s with its original mission alive.

It established its enduring qualities that have characterized it for more than 30 years: a festival is sensitive, intimate, focused on quality, still, youthful and thriving.

Today’s fest leadership team ­­— fest vets executive director Krystof Mucha and artistic director Karel Och — are part of a very rare and fortuitous organizational feat that provides the festival with continuity that pays dividends for filmmakers, film fans and sponsors.

Thanks to Bartoska, who passed away last year, the annual cinema celebration that he carefully built from a creative artist’s POV, today runs smoothly in the hands of the lieutenants he hired and developed into two of the international film festival world’s top professionals.

In 2026, Karlovy Vary operates with no less ambition and zeal than it did in 1994 when it essentially had to reinvent the entire operation.

I asked the duo what they felt made Karlovy Vary a valued and unique festival experience.

Mucha feels the greatness of Karlovy Vary lies in what he calls “the new young audience,” which he defines as “people who love film, and nothing else but quality is their criterion.”

He proudly describes it as “ a cinephile festival” as well as indisputably “the most important festival in Central and Eastern Europe.”

Och concurs, explaining the KV “experience” described to him by happy filmmakers as “appreciation of the focus on filmmakers and their work.”

Which is to say, in the art vs. commerce discussion, Karlovy Vary is a prized refuge for filmmakers wanting to bask in the former and occasionally skip out on the latter.

“I see us as a safe and respectful haven for the filmmakers,” says Och. “Especially the young ones, who entrust us with their films; I feel an enormous amount of responsibility connected to this task.”

As for the audiences at KV, Och charts his goal as “continuing to create these very special and meaningful moments for our spectators in KV.”

Steven Gaydos is the former executive editor of content at Variety.