The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival took its traditional black-tie opening night celebrations to the max on Friday to have fun the double anniversary of its sixtieth edition within the eightieth 12 months of the Czech fest with a room filled with stars, music and dance.
Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate, Kramer vs. Kramer, Rain Man) was honored with KVIFF‘s Crystal Globe for outstanding artistic contributions to world cinema, while Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Bride!, The Lost Daughter, Secretary, The Honourable Woman) received the festival’s President’s Award. And each charmed the adoring crowd with their speeches.
Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network, A Real Pain, When You Finish Saving the World) and Harvey Keitel (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Reservoir Dogs) were also amongst the large names within the room after walking the expanded red carpet of the festival within the Czech spa town.
Kryštof Mucha, the manager director of the world’s second-oldest film fest, and KVIFF artistic director Karel Och were, after all, available handy over the honors in the course of the big kickoff celebration, emceed by Czech TV host Marek Eben.
Hoffman took to the stage as he was showered in a thunderous standing ovation by the capability crowd within the legendary Grand Hall of the brutalist Hotel Thermal. “I’m honored and humbled by this award,” the soon-to-be-89-year-old began off saying. “A long time ago, once I worked with Robert Redford when he was a young child of 65, Redford said to me: ‘You never take into consideration a body of labor whilst you’re making movies, since you’re busy constructing the body.’ And that’s true. The pleasure of doing what we do is being engrossed within the work itself and losing track of time.”
Continued Hoffman: “I first fell in love with acting since it was the primary time I felt lost in time. I knew instinctively that this was how I desired to live. I desired to be lost in time. I desired to be absorbed in time. Why? Since it made me feel alive.”
The star also shared his emotions watching a sizzle reel of his work before coming to the stage. “When you find yourself turning 89 and there it’s, your life’s work on the screen, staring back at you, it makes me very emotional and really nostalgic, and most of all, very, very grateful to have had the chance to do what I really like decade after decade with so many sensible individuals who were doing what they loved too,” Hoffman concluded. “I would like to thank the Karlovy Vary Film Festival for serving this love of filmmaking. Festivals like this one help to support and encourage all of the young actors and filmmakers who pursue this work with passion and love, and that’s what makes it truly meaningful. So, thanks for the dignity of this award, but more importantly, thanks for joining with me in caring about this art form.”
Before Hoffman, Gyllenhaal also received an enormous and warm Czech welcome, a 12 months after her husband Peter Sarsgaard, who was along with her, got political on the KVIFF opening-night stage where he had been honored with the identical award. The fest’s bestowing the President’s Award on her also got here 20 years after Gyllenhaal won a competitive award at KVIFF as best actress for her role in Laurie Collyer’s drama Sherrybaby, by which she played a young woman who gets released from prison and is recovering from a heroin addiction. Sherrybaby also won Karlovy Vary’s Crystal Globe award back in 2006. Back then, the actress couldn’t come to town. But she recalled one time she visited Karlovy Vary before.
“I’ve been so moved by this whole night, by the attractive dancing and the singing. If you’ve seen my latest film, you’ll know that I really like dancing and singing, and I used to be teared up a bit bit watching everyone be so open, and it moved me. This is definitely the second time I’ve been to Karlovy Vary, regardless that I wasn’t in a position to pick up that lovely award for Sherrybaby. I used to be here once I was 19.”
One could hear surprise within the audience as she shared how she did a semester abroad in Prague when she was at Columbia University, during which she visited the spa town. “We ate the wafers, which I really like, tasted the [thermal] water, and that was actually one among the one activities I participated in once I was on the study abroad,” Gyllenhaal quipped. “I’m actually a extremely good student, but once I was studying in Prague, I didn’t go to essentially any classes in any respect.”
She then charmed the audience with some Czech words and phrases. “I believe that being here that semester was one among the primary inklings I had of myself as a director, because, as you saw from that, I made a complete lot of films as an actress, and to this point only two as a director,” she concluded. “It took me some time to appreciate that that was a greater job for me.”
She also recalled loving Milos Forman’s movie Loves of a Blonde. “I loved that movie, and it’s like something cracked in me. I went, I like that. OK, possibly everyone else likes The Firemen’s Ball higher. I like this higher. That is my taste, and I sort of began to go, OK, yeah, I like Quentin Tarantino, like everybody else does, and I also like Jane Campion, and I also like Fiddler on the Roof, and it seems I also like obscure Milos Forman movies, or one among them particularly.” Concluded Gyllenhaal: “That voice of going, ‘OK, that is me! That is what I like!’ is a component of what pushed me to be a director to precise my view of the world, nonetheless strange and difficult, and nonetheless different.”
The opening ceremony kicked off, as has turn out to be tradition, with the revealing of the brand new KVIFF trailer, this 12 months starring Stellan Skarsgård, and a giant spectacle of a stage show that gave a cinematic and musical tour through the festival’s history, including the Titanic theme sang in Czech and such tunes as MC Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This.
Eben quipped that the foreign audience members should know that every one on-stage singers are big Czech stars. “But in the event that they lived within the U.S. … they likely wouldn’t be such big stars.” Eben also jokingly thanked the Czech national soccer team for getting out of the soccer World Cup early “out of loyalty to the festival.”
The special honors for Hoffman and Gyllenhaal were followed by the opening film of KVIFF 2026. Kicking off the anniversary in the course of the soccer World Cup was, fittingly, the 1986 World Cup documentary The Match, directed by Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco, which chronicles the infamous match between Argentina and England, which became mostly remembered for Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal.
After the film, the opening night festival crowd and the entire town might be treated to a special musical show created by Czech DJ and producer NobodyListen, which is able to bring together personalities from the contemporary Czech music scene spanning a variety of genres and generations – including several musicians from Karlovy Vary itself.
The opening film and music show won’t be followed by the normal Karlovy Vary midnight fireworks, but by what organizers have called the most important drone show ever to be staged within the Czech Republic or Slovakia. The ten-minute aerial display, entitled “Stars and Winners of Your Own Story,” will see a fleet of 1,300 synchronized drones transforming the night sky.