Of Omnipresent, Absent Friends, of Unprepossessing Men and Putting Female Voices to the Front: The 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (and its Shadow Festivals)

In my write-up in Senses of last year’s 58th KVIFF,¹ I led with commentary on the ubiquity of celebration of Jiří Bartoška’s 30 years as festival President. Just shy of two months out from the opening of the 59th edition, the news broke that Bartoška – widely understood to have long been ill – had died, aged 78. This occasioned mourning and tributes from near and far, along with a little nervous speculation as to whether this famously festive festival might fall under a pall cast by his passing.

However, Bartoška in death was almost more ubiquitous in Karlovy Vary than ever. His cheerful, handsome visage, variously bearded or clean-shaven, adorned countless billboards scattered along the promenade between the Hotel Thermal festival hub and the grand indeed, yet toilet humour-friendly, Grandhotel Pupp, in the company of visiting stars and stalwart colleagues galore, radiating his famed bonhomie.

He wasn’t absent, exactly, on cinema screens throughout the festival either.

It’s never announced until close to kick-off just what KVIFF’s opening night film will be, ever inviting conjecture about which high profile star the festival might still be manoeuvring to land, to attach to a film to be unspooled in the Thermal’s vast Grand Hall.

It came as quite a surprise on June 25 when, perusing that day’s press release announcing the festival’s big-name guests to join the already-announced Michael Douglas – Stellan Skarsgård! Vicky Krieps! Dakota Johnson! Peter Sarsgaard! – I read that the festival opener would be Musíme to zarámovat! (rozhovor s Jiřím Bartoškou v červenci 2021) (We’ve Got to Frame It! [A Conversation With Jiří Bartoška in July 2021]).

Milan Kuchynka and Jakub Jurásek’s film was exactly what it said on the tin; curiously, it was to be a world premiere, notwithstanding that the extensive interview in question, conducted by Kuchynka, was already four years old. And unlike with the opening night pick in a typical year, the star would, of course, not be present in person.

That said, the opening ceremony would not be wanting for star wattage; Krieps and Sarsgaard were each to be granted the “KVIFF President’s Award”, notwithstanding that there was no longer a KVIFF President to issue them. The festival elected to honour Bartoška by deeming him sui generis; there will never be another KVIFF President. The award, though, lives on, with Dakota Johnson also to receive one on the third day of the festival.

Across recent editions, KVIFF has been signalling a clear intent to shift further from bridging East and West, most appreciably by jettisoning its longtime second-tier “East of the West” competition in favour of the less programmatically prescriptive “Proxima” three years ago. Opening with a feature-length, four-year-old interview with an actor-cum-festival figurehead adored in Czechia but much less well known beyond, to an audience constituted of fewer overseas festival guests than usual (assuming a diminished media allocation is a yardstick), spoke to a contrarily parochial outlook. As heartfelt and noble as it doubtless was to launch KVIFF with a tribute to a man without whose interventions and energies the festival would long have gone the way of the dodo, this seemed a perverse choice.

As a veteran of almost all KVIFFs since 2013 – including one in 2017 as an insider, when I worked on its now defunct, in-house Festival Daily paper – I watched the interview with great interest and enjoyment, but fancied it would have left cold or even bewildered foreign viewers less acquainted with the festival than me. But for fortunate folk like myself for whom the festival can, and has, become an essential pilgrimage, I feel this documentary could only be of considerable interest. It makes for a great companion piece to Filmová lázeň (Film Spa), Miroslav Janek’s fascinating 2015 documentary on KVIFF and all that socio-politically informed its rises and falls, its challenges, challengers, hot streaks and hiatuses. For such major players in the film cultural-industrial complex, film festivals of stature are a phenomenon grossly and bafflingly under-documented in the very medium they celebrate. Combined, We’ve Got to Frame It! and Film Spa offer a peerless level of insight into the evolution of an A-list film festival. 

On those grounds, the somewhat uncinematic We’ve Got to Frame It! is meritorious indeed. But as an opening night pick it still made for a strangely sentimental and provincial selection, at odds with the festival’s aspirations towards a greater cosmopolitanism and international prestige.Nevertheless, bolstered by being broadcast live and free of charge on the festival’s KVIFF.TV streaming platform, accessible on it throughout the festival, and boosted by two in-cinema screenings mid-festival, We’ve Got to Frame It! would go on to win the Právo Audience Award.

A testament to Bartoška’s enduring adoration, it remains accessible to domestic audiences on KVIFF.TV for a modest fee.

Bolek Polívka in the 2025 KVIFF trailer

KVIFF’s reliably grandiose opening ceremony always heralds the premiere of a new festival trailer, a much-anticipated unveiling in its own right. While I’ve enjoyed many of KVIFF’s starry promos over the years – and typically welcome their reappearance, subject to a seemingly randomised selection process as the lead-in to screenings throughout each festival – this year’s was the first time I can say I found one to be genuinely moving. 

At first, the edition’s trailer appears to be a tribute to beloved Czech actor and performer, Bolek Polívka, recipient of a President’s Award in 2022. However, regular trailer-maker Ivan Zachariáš mined pathos rather than the usual chuckles out of a skit in which a seated Polívka appears to be talking to an imaginary old friend opposite, in a sparsely peopled, typical Czech pub, only for it to become apparent he’s addressing his great but absent pal, Bartoška. (The latter does appear in a photograph and on a TV screen in the background, however.) It was a very touching tribute from the festival, Zachariáš and Polívka all.²

Tiger Theory

To celebrate Bartoška the actor, Radek Bajgar’s dramedy Teorie tygra (Tiger Theory, 2016) was granted a fresh airing. Bartoška played Jan, a veterinarian of a certain age who wistfully castrates a cat named Tiger in the opening scene; this serves as an unsubtle springboard for a re-evaluation of a henpecked life. Bajgar follows Jan as he feigns having Alzheimer’s disease (!) and embraces institutionalisation (of sorts) in – or rather, mostly roaming free outside of – an asylum, the better to do as he pleases away from his wife, Olga (Eliška Balzerová). Like one of Jan’s daughters and mother-in-law (the great Iva Janžurová), she’s painted as a domineering harpy who expects nothing less than for her other half to bend entirely to her will.

For all its breezy, picturesque qualities, Tiger Theory is a very chauvinistic film. It was a box-office success upon release, so it was an understandable selection as a tribute from, again, a parochial perspective. Perhaps it was unfortunate that last year’s KVIFF already showed the restoration of František Vláčil’s gripping Stíny horkého léta (Shadows of a Hot Summer, 1977), which would have served as a more ecumenical tribute to Bartoška (notwithstanding that, although a central character, he doesn’t have any lines in it!), or perhaps a re-run of Jan Němec’s berserk and underseen (albeit also decidedly chauvinistic) V žáru královské lásky (The Flames of Royal Love, 1990), which enlivened the 2019 edition no end.

Ecce homo Homolka

Tiger Theory seems like a gentle revenge fantasy played out upon the timeworn superabundance of milquetoast males across Czech cinema. This is an archetype painted in terms less disparaging, and more affectionate and self-deprecating, by a number of figures interviewed in Marek Novák and Mikuláš Novotný’s Projekt český film (The Czech Film Project). Inspired by Wim Wenders’ Room 666 (1982) and enjoying its world premiere as a “Special Screening”, The Czech Film Project sat down umpteen Czech filmmakers before a static camera in an empty Thermal Hotel room several storeys up during last year’s KVIFF, to meditate upon what it is that makes Czech films Czech. Several filmmakers inevitably cited Czech humour, and a number namechecked the exemplary, tightknit New Wave triumvirate of Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer and Jaroslav Papoušek. 

A key directorial work of the latter – the least well known internationally of the trio – was this year’s Czech National Film Archive “Back on Screens” KVIFF digitisation (not “restoration”, per se, but “digitisation”) highlight, Ecce homo Homolka (1969). Completed after both Forman and Passer had exiled themselves in the USA, it features Forman’s twin sons, Matěj and Petr, who would later become celebrated theatremakers. The brothers introduced the screening in the Thermal Grand Hall, with Petr commenting that “I say this all the time, and I’m happy to say it again: that film is beautiful because it’s about all of us. Everyone can see themselves in it – there’s a bit of that stereotypical small-minded Czech in all of us”, before drolly adding that “we reached the peak of our acting careers when we were six”.³

It’s not drawing a long bow to draw a direct line to Tiger Theory from the rambunctious, farcical burlesquing of intergenerational domestic gender warfare in the tremendously entertaining Ecce homo Homolka, which is far the more artful, appreciably satirical and thus endearing of the two titles. From the enthusiasm of many of the Czech Film Project participants, it’s clear that line will stretch well into the future too.

From the example of Pavel Juráček’s Každý mladý muž (Every Young Man), included in the “Out of the Past” section, it’s also clear that the gormless Czech men’s cinematic lineage goes back further. Awarded by FIPRESCI at the 1966 KVIFF, Juráček’s terrific first feature was made for the Czechoslovak Army Film Unit while he performed his military service, and was surely not successful in pitching army life as a turbocharged domain of brute virility. (It is also not likely that this was Juráček’s aim.)

Programmed to celebrate the centenary of the august international critics’ federation, Every Young Man was given a terrific introduction, steeped in Czechoslovak New Wave lore, by FIPRESCI vice-president and editor-in-chief, Elena Rubashevska. The figure of the Czech milksop can doubtless be traced back further – to various screen Švejks, for starters, notwithstanding the ambiguity around whether the passivity and foolishness of Jaroslav Hašek’s iconic character is a ruse, including the most indelible, that embodied by Rudolf Hrušínský in Karel Steklý’s Dobrý voják Švejk (The Good Soldier Švejk, 1956) and that film’s 1958 sequel, Poslušně hlásím (Beg to Report).

Broken Voices

Moving on from unimpressive men, three particularly strong titles premiering across the festival’s two competition strands constituted a compelling clutch of narrative films foregrounding the travails of female singers, augmented by a fourth, Urška Djukić’s  Berlinale-premiering Kaj ti je deklica (Little Trouble Girls).

While Djukić’s debut feature was well received in Berlin and has picked up traction subsequently, one can well imagine it a higher-profile award-winner had it premiered in Karlovy Vary instead. A majority-Slovenian production, it would have been a shoo-in to be awarded in a yesteryears’ East of the West strand, which was dedicated to Eastern European first and second features. It would have elevated and been a serious awards contender in either of this year’s competitions too. Moreover, it’d have paired beautifully with Ondřej Provazník’s  Sbormistr (Broken Voices), a new Czech film in the Crystal Globe main competition. Both films concern girls’ choirs on tour abroad, centred around a protagonist for whom the trip combines the discombobulation of coming of age with that of abusive conduct perpetrated by a male choirmaster.

Set shortly after 1989’s Velvet Revolution opened up the world for Czechs and Slovaks, Broken Voices was shot on 16mm to aesthetically entrench its action – inclusive of key events in New York City – in a bygone time. I was confused by this at first, wondering why a rare – unprecedented, even? – Czech #MeToo story should be made a period drama. Surely it wasn’t to suggest that such things only happened in the past? I was heartened (but naturally, also dismayed) to learn that this framing was not motivated by any perverse, avoidant thinking in this #MeToo-informed era, but rather to allude to particular historical events, well known domestically, that inspired the film. These events concerned the sexual abuse of minors perpetrated over two decades by the choirmaster of Prague’s Bambini di Praga choir, Bohumil Kulínský, which came to light in the 2000s.

(I thought it curious that Broken Voices’ original Czech title translates to “Choirmaster”, suggesting the audience’s point of identification be directed towards charismatic, longhaired Choirmaster Mácha [Juraj Loj] – the perpetrator of the film’s gingerly handled scene of sexual assault – rather than towards victims, as alluded to in the English translation. Make of that what you will.)

If Broken Voices is Eastern Euro miserabilism lite – i.e., delicately upsetting in a non-box office-alienating fashion rather than outright, almost unflinchingly harrowing and destined to only play the festival circuit and arthouse streamers, à la Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April (about which, more below) – then Little Trouble Girls is Broken Voices’ wider-eyed, Alice Rohrwacher-esque, Catholicism-steeped, queer-questioning sister, replete with enigmatic denouement. Which is the stronger film? That might depend on personal taste vis-à-vis the merits of fairly conventional narrative resolutions versus those of a more “arthouse” persuasion. I thought both films were terrific, with their young leads (Kateřina Falbrová in Broken Voices and Jara Sofija Ostan in Little Trouble Girls) each announcing themselves as actors to watch.

While it’s a given that competitors for the Crystal Globe shall number twelve, only eleven were announced in a June 3 press release. It was, though, noted that the announcement of a twelfth would be postponed until closer to the festival. Only on June 25 was  the final title finally  heralded, owing to safety and travel concerns for its cast and crew: an Iranian film, Bidad, directed by Soheil Beiraghi. In Bidad (or “outcry”), a woman’s singing voice isn’t one of many assimilated into a greater, orchestrated whole as in Broken Voices and Little Trouble Girls, but rather a lone voice of street resistance against an arch-patriarchal regime that forbids women to perform in public.

This woman is Seti (Sarvin Zabetian), frustrated at barely being able to discern her recorded voice when brought in to provide backing vocals on a pop track with a male vocal lead. In order to feel seen and heard, she takes to the streets of Tehran to sing and becomes a social media-fuelled sensation; a fracas at one performance serves as a meet-cute with a freewheeling, tattooed, pot-growing maverick going by “Hey-you”, played with vivacity by an unrecognisable Amir Jadidi (star of Asghar Farhadi’s Qahremaan [A Hero, 2021]).

There’s undeniable chemistry between the pair, but their hangouts are notably chaste. Similarly, for all of Zabetian’s charisma and poise as a performer, I couldn’t believe she was actually singing the music live on the street; the audio-video synch looked out. This is presumably indicative of the limits in Iranian cinema – even guerrilla Iranian cinema – to not just what can be narrativised and shown on film, but even performed and shot in the first place. The stakes of course are very real; even before the film premiered at KVIFF, it was reported that the director, his leading lady and Leyli Rashidi – who plays Seti’s mercurial, alcoholic mother – had each been “sentenced to fines in lieu of imprisonment”. Notably, given her character’s fleeting social media fame, and consonant with a particular police punishment meted out to her, Zabetian was also barred from using a smartphone for five years.⁴

Some consolation: Bidad would go on to land the $15,000 USD Special Jury Prize – enough to cover those fines, and then some.

Alexandros Voulgaris’ Vgainoun mesa ap ti Margo (They Come Out of Margo), from the Proxima competition, completed the quartet and also foregrounded a woman’s solo voice – and it was a whole other kettle of fish/sinkful of heaving, vomited effluvia besides.

An elliptical, non-linear, lurching, twitching, convulsing, pixilation phantasmagoria, employing a wide array of filmic textures and given to stop-motion body-horror ruptures, it was far and away the most formally experimental of the four. Indeed, it’s rare to see a film so brazenly experimental in competition at an A-list festival. Concerning the 40th birthday celebrations of its titular celebrated singer-songwriter (Sofia Kokkali), a woman who’s been reclusive for several years, They Come Out of Margo is a heady rush of not-always assimilable imagery, much of it a projection of psychological matter from Margo’s troubled mind into the Athenian apartment she resides in – indeed, that she inhabits for the film’s full runtime – and which, long ago, was the site of a family tragedy. All the while, a captivating soundtrack constantly shifts gears, spanning musique concrète to gorgeous dream-pop – the latter composed by The Boy (aka director Voulgaris). This was my film of the festival!

Duchoň

Still on the topic of singers, it behooves me not to overlook a notable film about a male singer: Duchoň, from Slovak director Peter Bebjak, which enjoyed its world premiere as another of those curiously categorised Special Screenings.

Also an impressive actor, Bebjak helmed one of my favourite Slovak films of the last several years, the Slovak-Ukrainian border-set gangster flick, Čiara (The Line), which premiered in competition at the 2017 KVIFF. An unusually high-profile filmmaker in the region to be openly gay, Bebjak’s filmography has been quite eclectic, yet Duchoň represents the first time where I’ve clearly clocked him bringing something of a queer sensibility to his moviemaking.

With considerable élan and a committed, winning performance from Vladislav Plevčík as the lead, Duchoň is a biopic relating the rise and fall of Normalisation-era, Slovak pop star, Karol Duchoň (1950-1985) – the “Czechoslovak Tom Jones”, if you will. 

Replete with fantastic musical numbers – some using Duchoň’s original recordings, others re-recorded and convincingly sung by Plevčík – and with a Cheshire Cat-like turn from Vojtěch Kotek as Karel Gott which occasioned great hoots of mirth in the audience, it was the most uncomplicatedly enjoyable film of the festival. Much of it plays like an extended pop video, with a spectacularly choreographed finale deviating from period-appropriateness to incorporate (or perhaps queerly appropriate?) breaking and even ballroom dance moves.

Duchoň received a tremendous standing ovation in the Thermal Grand Hall. Bebjak appeared quite overcome; it was lovely to have been present at such a joyous premiere.

Bidad

At every film festival, there are several shadow festivals. As a critic, one often sees films at a remove from the event proper, mostly in occasion-impoverished press and industry screenings. These are often held in auditoria reserved for these showings, if not always comfortably purpose-built for them. As ever, I saw several screenings in just such a fashion.

There’s also the shadow festival wherein the films take a back seat to the other half of the equation: festivity. This is an area where KVIFF has long excelled, though I was not the only one wondering this year what had become of several of the functions, banquets and receptions customarily thrown by third parties around the festival periphery.

(And what to make of a “Cocktail with the Mayor” at which there were drinks for invited guests – festival regulars – but no lunching, as in bygone years, and at which the Mayor spoke in German rather than in Czech or in the festival’s lingua franca, English, even referring to the city as Karlsbad!?)

Within most festivals of this nature and stature, there’s also a “festival of festivals” strand (per the Toronto International Film Festival’s official designation for its first 18 editions). Several of the strongest new films each year screen in “Horizons”, KVIFF’s  own festivals festival, whereby one can catch up with films that premiered elsewhere. Sometimes this is with the added value of guests in attendance who vibe especially well with the event’s genius loci. Here, especially for KVIFF’s historic strength, Eastern European cinema, there can be much to be gained, as when Sergei Loznitsa (and lead Aleksandr Kuznetsov) were on hand for a droll Q&A after screenings of the director’s exactingly Kafkaesque Two Prosecutors. Loznitsa’s wry quips about the ready parallels to be drawn between its 1937 setting and the present day, and about the grim prison in Riga used for the shoot only being decommissioned in 2007 after 100-plus years in use, owing to an imposition of EU standards, landed with surely greater oomph in a land with lived experience of Soviet totalitarianism than in Cannes during its premiere in May.

Ditto for Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, where the director held court after an eventful screening in which someone fainted during a harrowing abortion scene. Would anyone in Venice for its premiere last year have even thought to ask her in a Q&A afterwards whether that scene was unsimulated, as happened at KVIFF? Would Kulumbegashvili’s accounts of the terrible turns Georgian society is taking with regards to human rights, and in greater aligning itself with Russia once more, have carried the same weight in the Floating City as in Karlovy Vary? I think not.

Then there are KVIFF’s official shadow festivals or, to use the parlance commonly employed in Czech film culture, its “echoes”. “Šary Vary” this year offered an opportunity to catch-up, post-KVIFF, on several drawcard titles in cinemas in Prague and Brno; a few titles also leapt straight onto KVIFF.TV. Should a KVIFF festival report include films seen in this fashion? What about KVIFF “festival of festivals” films seen elsewhere before (or after) the festival, which bear noteworthy thematic or zeitgeist-addressing connective tissue with films actually caught during KVIFF proper – when, for the sake of an exercise such as this report, does a festival truly begin and end?

And there’s one more shadow festival still, comprising all the films that went unseen. Were that I had a clone who could have attended all of this year’s John Garfield retrospective, and reported back to me! It looked a fantastic program; I caught only the classic noir Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948) – on 35mm, no less – and my, that film has aged wonderfully well. Or is it that the USA circa 2025 is aging spectacularly badly? There were many other films I missed in Karlovy Vary that, had I my time all over again, I might have troubled to catch, and some that I might not ever be able to catch elsewhere. But so it goes…

The Death of the Beautiful Deer

For the morbidly inclined and lachrymose, a highlight of every KVIFF is the closing ceremony’s obituary montage. This year’s opened with Karel Heřmánek, the charismatic lead of Karel Kachyňa’s Smrt krásných srnců (The Death of the Beautiful Deer, 1986), for me a revelatory inclusion in this year’s program. Heřmánek, moreover, had been included in a number of anecdotes from Jiří Bartoška in the opening night film; along with this year’s trailer star, Bolek Polívka, he had studied acting alongside Bartoška in Brno’s Janáček Academy of Performing Arts, back in the day.

Vladimír Smutný, the brilliant DoP responsible for Beautiful Deer’s exuberant, balletic cinematography, also appeared in the obit reel – a further sad footnote to the inclusion of Kachyňa’s coming-of-WWII tragi-dramedy, which is centred around Heřmánek’s charming turn as a philandering traveling Electrolux salesman. Yet Beautiful Deer was programmed as a tribute to its prolific and similarly accomplished editor, Jiří Brožek. Happily still very much alive, Brožek became the first editor to accept the KVIFF President’s Award, come closing night.

The closing figure in the obituary reel was, of course, Bartoška. The montage celebrating his acting career made it clear there were many parts he’d played I was unacquainted with. (So again – did it really have to be Tiger Theory that was programmed to honour him?)

Better Go Mad in the Wild

A sad postscript: František Klišík, one of the reclusive twin subjects of Miro Remo’s Crystal Globe-winning documentary, Raději zešílet v divočině (Better Go Mad in the Wild, though “I’d Rather Go Mad in the Wild” parses better), was found dead the morning after the film was awarded at the closing ceremony.

I regret – and I wasn’t alone in this – that this wasn’t a film I’d clocked as a contender for the festival’s main gong and, alas, I missed it. Nevertheless, in a festival marked by the passing of a number of major players in Czech(oslovak) cinema, vale František Klišík, too.

And now to close with a further, more personally felt elegy. Many of my fellow KVIFF pilgrims and I paid our own tribute mid-festival to a fallen colleague, the Icelandic critic, poet and fellow Thermal Terrace Bar habitue and bon vivant, Ásgeir H Ingólfsson. The shadow cast by his passing was for me, and for many stalwart friends who only reliably catch up with one another en masse at KVIFF each year, the longest cast at the festival by some margin – and that’s with all due respect to the late lamented Jiří Bartoška, et al. We honoured Ásgeir just as we imagined he’d have wanted it – in song, in verse, in inebriated wordplay, in excursive anecdotes and in pledges to continue doing so ever after, and by in no way diminishing our festivity at this enduringly festive film festival of festivals within festivals.

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
4 – 12 July 2025
Festival website: https://www.kviff.com/en/homepage

Endnotes