Karlovy Vary Festival Marks 80 Years at Cannes
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- Karlovy Vary International Film Festival marked its 80th birthday with a beachside luncheon at Plage Des Palmes during the Cannes Film Festival, hosted in partnership with Variety and complete with a multi-tier birthday cake
- Festival chair Krystof Mucha, who has been with Karlovy Vary since 1997 and was named chair last year, cut the cake and thanked Variety for "being with us more for than three decades" and guests for being "our friends and supporters through the ages"
- Variety publisher and co-president Dea Lawrence described Karlovy Vary as combining "the glamour of Hollywood with the youthful exuberance" of young European cinephiles, calling the Czech spa town "among the most picturesque settings you could choose for a film festival"
- Karlovy Vary, launched in 1946 in Bohemia, is the second-oldest film festival in the world after Venice and was revitalized in 1994 by Czech theater and film star Jiří Bartoška, with Rockaway Arts (led by Jakub Havrlant) now the majority owner
- The festival's 1960s legacy centered on Czech New Wave filmmakers and visiting auteurs including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tony Richardson, Glauber Rocha, and Martin Ritt, with later guests ranging from Robert Redford and Robert De Niro to Johnny Depp and Uma Thurman
- Variety's Steven Gaydos wrote that the festival "was born in the 1940s under oppression, helped showcase unstoppable talents in the 1960s, who were then suppressed," before reemerging in the early '90s "sensitive, intimate, focused on quality, still, youthful and thriving"
Why it matters: For Karlovy Vary, an 80th-anniversary toast staged on Cannes' most exclusive beach signals the festival's arrival as a peer player in the European festival circuit, now backed by Rockaway Arts' majority ownership and a 30-plus-year partnership with Variety that funnels Hollywood industry attention to the Czech spa town.
