Welcoming a formidable U.S. contingent, this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival opened on a wave of joyful reflection. The mood was fitting: the Czech festival is celebrating both its 80th anniversary and only its 60th edition, thanks to a Soviet-era interruption that led to every-other-year festivals and created one of cinema’s more unusual anniversary calculations. With two milestones to commemorate, the festival’s famously exuberant opening ceremony had twice the reason to reminisce.
“We have a natural tendency toward nostalgia,” artistic director Karel Och said. “But we know that dwelling on it can hold us back, so we try to shift gears and look forward as well.”
That balance carried through the Friday evening ceremony. Jesse Eisenberg, Harvey Keitel and Oscar-winning producer John Lesher (“Birdman”) looked on from the audience, while Crystal Globe honoree Dustin Hoffman and President’s Award recipient Maggie Gyllenhaal accepted their honors with deeply personal speeches.
“If you’re very lucky, one day you get to be an old man like me,” Hoffman said, ahead of his 89th birthday. “Then you can see your life’s work on screen staring back at you. It makes me feel emotional, reflective and, most of all, very grateful to have had the opportunity to do what I love, decade after decade, alongside so many others doing what they love too.”
“I first fell in love with acting because it was the first time I felt lost in time,” he continued. “I knew instinctively that this was how I wanted to live. I wanted to be lost in time. I wanted to be absorbed in time, because it made me feel alive.”
Fresh off a mid-career pivot to directing, Gyllenhaal paid tribute to the festival that honored her with its best actress prize for 2006’s “Sherrybaby,” as well as to the Czech film culture that inspired her as a 19-year-old exchange student to pursue a life in cinema.
“[Discovering Miloš Forman’s films during my semester in Prague] pushed me to become a director, to express my view of the world, however strange or challenging or different it might be,” Gyllenhaal said. “Something cracked open… and I discovered my own tastes.”
Gyllenhaal — who will preside over the Venice Film Festival jury in September — also paid tribute to Jiří Bartoška, the actor who became the defining steward of Karlovy Vary’s modern era, serving as festival president and its public face from the 1990s until his death in May 2025. His absence is still deeply felt.
“That loss is still very fresh,” Och told TheWrap. “It’s also connected to the loss of my predecessor, the former artistic director Eva Zaoralová, which happened in 2022. These were key figures in the festival’s renaissance in the early ’90s — they’re still with us in a way, and we miss them all the time. But we try not to be too melancholic.”
Instead, the KVIFF organizers have assembled a program that honors the festival’s legacy both explicitly and by example. Ahead of this anniversary edition — a so-called “Vary Special Year,” in keeping with the festival’s typically irreverent branding — Och spent six months immersed in the Czech National Film Archive, combing through decades of materials while preparing the retrospective Out of the Past, devoted entirely to Karlovy Vary’s own history.
“It was incredible to discover not just the films we already know, but everything that was happening at those early editions — the amount of work our former colleagues put in, and all the lesser-known parts of the festival’s story,” he said. “It feels very relevant this year, because you realize how much of that rich history is still part of what we’re doing today.”
Och also allowed a measure of serendipity to shape this year’s lineup — particularly in his choice of opening film.
Directed by Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco, “The Match” is a sleek, crowd-pleasing sports documentary retracing the political and cultural tensions surrounding Argentina’s quarterfinal victory over England at the 1986 World Cup, forever remembered for Diego Maradona’s infamous “Hand of God” goal and his breathtaking solo effort just four minutes later. Taut as a steel drum and relentlessly propulsive, the film struck Och as an ideal festival opener.
“This is about so much more than soccer,” he said. “It’s a psychologically well-constructed film that expands your understanding far beyond the sport. It’s also tremendously entertaining and, with the World Cup underway, especially timely. But honestly, it comes down to intuition. I try to bring analytical thinking into my programming decisions, but ultimately it’s about gut instinct, the punch of it.”
That “The Match” is also a ghost story feels especially fitting. Juxtaposing abundant archival footage with contemporary black-and-white interviews featuring all but two of the game’s principal figures, the film foregrounds the absence of Argentine captain Diego Maradona and England manager Bobby Robson. Playing as both an elegiac and energetic ode to glory, it becomes an apt overture to an anniversary edition animated by jubilant memory.
Also at the opening ceremony, the festival known for the funniest, most stylish trailers from any film festival anywhere unveiled its latest entry, which stars Stellan Skarsgård and a batch of earthworks. The trailer can be seen here.