Hoffman Gets Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary Opener
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Dustin Hoffman received the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema at the opening ceremony of the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where a showreel spanning "Tootsie," "Rain Man," and "Kramer vs. Kramer" left him visibly emotional on stage.
- Hoffman said he felt "honored and humbled" and quoted the late Robert Redford, who once told him: "You never think about a body of work while you're making movies, because you're busy building the body."
- Approaching his 89th birthday in early August, Hoffman told the audience acting first made him feel alive because "it was the first time I felt lost in time," and he will present a special screening of Mike Nichols's 1967 "The Graduate" at the festival.
- Hoffman's memoir "Look at Me" will be published Nov. 10 through Simon & Schuster's Simon Six imprint, covering his life, family background, achievements, and what it means to pursue his own creativity.
- Maggie Gyllenhaal received the festival's President's Award at the same ceremony, recalling that as a 19-year-old Columbia University exchange student in Prague, watching Miloš Forman's "Loves of a Blonde" in a Czech Culture Studies class first cracked open her directorial sensibility: "Something happened to me. I loved that movie."
- Gyllenhaal, who won best actress at Karlovy Vary in 2006 for "Sherrybaby," has directed only two films — "The Bride" and "The Lost Daughter" — and told the crowd "it took me a while to realize that was the better job for me."
- The ceremony opened with live renditions of film hits from the last six decades, including Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" and Keala Settle's "This Is Me," and was followed by the screening of Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco's "The Match" as the festival's opening night film; the 60th edition runs July 3-11.
Why it matters: The festival's 60th edition paired Hoffman's lifetime-achievement honor — weeks before his 89th birthday and the release of his memoir — with Gyllenhaal's President's Award, where she credited a Prague semester watching Forman's 'Loves of a Blonde' as the seed of her directorial career.
