The recent passing of Czech acting legend Jiří Bartoška, aged 78, was always going to cast a long shadow over the latest edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. President of the event since 1994, and, alongside the late Eva Zaoralová, the chief architect of its renaissance thereafter, the actor was the subject of the opening night film, We’ve Got to Frame It! (a conversation with Jiří Bartoška in July 2021), a documentary directed by Milan Kuchynka and Jakub Jurásek. Surprisingly, the festival didn’t go too overboard on Bartoška’s legacy, partly, perhaps, because they paid a handsome tribute last year.
Bartoška also has a co-starring role in this year’s festival trailer. Karlovy Vary is famous for not being precious about its honorary awards; each year’s trailer features a previous winner trash-talking, misusing or even destroying the event’s distinctive Crystal Globe statuette. For the 59th edition, local star Bolek Polívka is seen buying shots in a dive bar with an unseen friend and humbly offering to share one of his two Crystal Globe wins. The short film ends with the reveal that the chair opposite him is empty, as he drinks a toast to his old friend Bartoška.
As well as its trailers, the festival is famous for its gnomic dance routines, and this year was no exception. Filling the stage with androgynous women dressed in black and making sometimes terrifying use of pure white light and heavy industrial techno, the latest interpretative dance extravaganza appeared to be a Lynchian comment on the parlous state of today’s world. Whatever it actually was, it remains, as always in Karlovy Vary, open to interpretation.
Two of this year’s special guests were there to pick up their Crystal Globe awards, the first being actress Vicky Krieps, who confessed to being woefully unprepared for the occasion. “I have to tell you the truth,” she said. “I’m really bad at this. I’m not good at behaving, or fitting in, or doing what I’m supposed to do, so I’ll not give the speech you think I’m going give. I don’t even know how. My son just told me, ‘Oh, mom, it’s fine. You got this. Just improvise.’ So that’s what I’m doing.”
Krieps’s brief speech also touched on the thorny issue of current affairs. “Other than saying thank you for this award — I actually very much appreciate it — I would like to say that I love film festivals,” she said. “I think they’re just the best thing in the world, together with cinema, and if movies are not misused, they can go across borders and transport the most powerful messages. They don’t ask for your passport, or where you from or how much money you have or if you’re cool or not.”
“I was never cool,” she said, to much laughter. “I was always not cool. I didn’t finish my studies. But I’m here, and all I did was I believe in the dream. Y’know, movies give us the space to dream and cope. We come to this planet with nothing, and I will leave with nothing. So, unfortunately, even a beautiful award will not go with me to where I’m going. But I will take all the memories and all my dreams, and that’s what movies can do. So, we should try and save movies, so they continue to exist, and they continue to spread love and peace and, more importantly, forgiveness.”
Following her onto the stage was American actor Peter Sarsgaard, who made a slightly more daring comment, directly addressing the zeitgeist back home while stopping short of naming the elephant in the room.
“Making a film is a collective action,” he said with a wry smile, after a wide-ranging clip reel of his performances, “and I’m proud of some of the work that you just saw. Maybe not all of it, but any actor will tell you the good work is only possible in an environment that supports it. [Director] Michelle Franco supports it. Tim Fehlbaum supports it. Billy Ray, Kim Pierce, Tim Robbins, and, of course, my wife Maggie Gyllenhaal. There is no going it alone.
“As my country retreats from its global responsibilities and tries to go it alone,” he continued, “it is also being divided into factions within factions, of politics, gender, sexuality, race… Jews [are] split over war. But when there’s a common enemy, there is no going it alone. The enemies are the forces that divide us, that individuate us. We all know who they are. Collective action is the only way forward in art and in our happiness. So, thank you for this. I couldn’t have done it without all of you. And in the words of [former Czech president Václav Havel], one half of a room cannot remain forever warm while the other half is cold. Thank you.”