The 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival: Notes From the Inside

Each summer, the spa town of Karlovy Vary transforms into something electric. For more than seven decades, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) has been the beating heart of Central European cinema. Founded in 1946, it weathered Cold War politics, survived alternating years with Moscow, and reinvented itself after the Velvet Revolution. Today it is one of the few “A-list” festivals in the world, with its Crystal Globe recognized alongside prizes from Cannes, Venice, and Berlin.

Stellan Skarsgard with Crystal Globe for Outsatnding Artisitc Contribution

This year, the 59th edition ran from July 4–12, 2025. It featured 175 films across 465 screenings, with 36 world premieres. Stars such as Michael Douglas, Dakota Johnson, Stellan Skarsgard, Vicky Krieps, and Peter Sarsgaard walked the red carpet. The festival opened with We’ve Got to Frame It!, a tribute to late festival president Jiří Bartoška, whose leadership shaped KVIFF’s modern identity. But for me, the real story lay in the Crystal Globe competition and the conversations I was able to have with nine of its twelve directors nominated.

Cinema as Dialogue

One of those directors, Spain’s Pere Vilà Barceló, put it best: “For me, cinema can’t just be aesthetics. We live in a society that demands responsibility from cinema… cinema as an art form interests me when it honestly seeks to engage in dialogue, sometimes to make the audience uncomfortable”. That idea, "dialogue", became a throughline in nearly every film I watched and every interview I recorded.

• In When a River Becomes the Sea, Pere tackled gender violence as a universal social problem.

  
  

• Nina Knag’s Don’t Call Me Mama illuminated migration, empathy, and taboo. She admitted some actors balked: “They were afraid of touching that, afraid of the intimate scenes”. In the end, her choice of Pia Tjelta was confimred by a Crystal Globe for Best Actress.

  
  

• Gözde Kural’s Cinema Jezireh revealed life in Afghanistan under Taliban control.

  
  

• Ukrainian documentarian Dmytro Hreshko turned drone footage into poetry: “They show me some burned forest with a lot of shells on ground, unexploded, and it blew my mind… it was my first connect to the war”.

  
  

These films weren’t simply “festival art.” They were acts of engagement, daring audiences to sit in discomfort and consider the world beyond the cinema.

A related theme I saw and heard the directors speak about was trauma, and how to depict it without exploitation. Czech filmmaker Ondřej Provazník explained why his film Broken Voices avoids the conventional structure: “Usually films about trauma are about that, that the trauma happens in the first third of the film, and then people deal with that. But I just wanted somehow to portray the things that are before the trauma even happens… how tricky this environment is”.

Lithuanian director Vytautas Katkus, who won Best Director for The Visitor, also described his affinity for slowness: “I really enjoy slow cinema, poetic cinema… I decided to take a risk and be a director the role I was really avoiding for many, many years”.At Karlovy Vary, patience mattered. These films took their time. They trusted rhythm. And they asked us to trust them in return.

That trust extended to casting. Katkus often works with non-professionals, including his own father: “I’m not actor. He’s not actor… everyone knows there’s no professional actor here. I really want to show this kind of being”. His attempts at naturalism lowered expectations on set aand matched well with a few porfessionals like Arvydas Dapsys anchoring "The Visitor".

Miro Remo with Crystal Globe

Miro Remo, who won the Crystal Globe Grand Prix for Better Go Mad in the Wild, echoed that sentiment when talking about his apprach towards his subjects twins Franta and Ondra. “We must become friends. It was necessary to have a really, really huge and deep relationship. That’s the starting point for me”. It turned out to be a heartbreaking investment as Ondra would be found dead the day after participating in the awards ceremony.

These directors weren’t interested in polish for its own sake. They wanted presence. They wanted truth. And in their hands, Karlovy Vary became a place where reality and fiction

constantly bled into one another.

Why KVIFF Matters

Covering the festival, I kept thinking about its place in film history. Founded in 1946, it started as a showcase for Czechoslovak cinema, later becoming one of the few windows onto world film for Eastern Bloc audiences. During the Cold War, it alternated years with Moscow. After 1989, it was reborn as a fiercely independent festival with an eye toward both global prestige and local voices.

That legacy is still visible. The 59th edition honored its past with tributes to Jiří Bartoška and screenings of restored classics, while also embracing the future  from bold regional debuts to the premiere of a cinematic cut of the video game Kingdom Come: Deliverance II.

What struck me most, though, was how unified the directors were around the notion that cinema must be alive a dialogue between artists and audiences, past and present, art and politics.

As a podcaster, I came away humbled. One thing that became clear from these discussions, the future of European cinema is in good hands.

👉 You can hear all nine conversations in our Stream Close Up KVIFF series. They’re intimate, challenging, and at times uncomfortable exactly what Karlovy Vary asks of us, year after year.