The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival took its traditional black-tie opening night celebrations to the max on Friday to celebrate the double anniversary of its 60th edition in the 80th year of the Czech fest with a room full of 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 both charmed the adoring crowd with their speeches, which included anecdotes about Robert Redford and a study semester abroad, as well as expressions of love for the craft of filmmaking.
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 among the big names in the room after walking the expanded red carpet of the festival in the Czech spa town.
Kryštof Mucha, the executive director of the world’s second-oldest film fest, and KVIFF artistic director Karel Och were, of course, on hand to hand over the honors during 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 capacity crowd in the legendary Grand Hall of the brutalist Hotel Thermal. “I am honored and humbled by this award,” the soon-to-be-89-year-old started off saying. “Decades ago, when I worked with Robert Redford when he was a young child of 65, Redford said to me: ‘You never think about a body of work while you’re making movies, because you’re busy building the body.’ And that’s true. The pleasure of doing what we do is being engrossed in the work itself and losing track of time.”
Continued Hoffman: “I first fell in love with acting because it was the first time I felt lost in time. I knew instinctively that this was how I wanted to live. I wanted to be lost in time. I wanted to be absorbed in time. Why? Because 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 are turning 89 and there it is, your life’s work on the screen, staring back at you, it makes me very emotional and very nostalgic, and most of all, very, very grateful to have had the opportunity to do what I love decade after decade with so many brilliant people who were doing what they loved too,” Hoffman concluded. “I want to thank the Karlovy Vary Film Festival for serving this love of filmmaking. Festivals like this one help to support and inspire all the young actors and filmmakers who pursue this work with passion and love, and that’s what makes it truly meaningful. So, thank you for the honor of this award, but more importantly, thank you for joining with me in caring about this art form.”
Before Hoffman, Gyllenhaal also received a huge and warm Czech welcome, a year after her husband Peter Sarsgaard, who was with her, got political on the KVIFF opening-night stage where he had been honored with the same award. The fest’s bestowing the President’s Award on her also came 20 years after Gyllenhaal won a competitive award at KVIFF as best actress for her role in Laurie Collyer’s drama Sherrybaby, in 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 beautiful dancing and the singing. If you have seen my latest film, you’ll know that I love dancing and singing, and I was teared up a little bit watching everyone be so open, and it moved me. This is actually the second time I’ve been to Karlovy Vary, even though I wasn’t able to pick up that beautiful award for Sherrybaby. I was here when I was 19.”
One could hear surprise in 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 love, tasted the [thermal] water, and that was actually one of the only activities I participated in when I was on the study abroad,” Gyllenhaal quipped. “I’m actually a really good student, but when I was studying in Prague, I didn’t go to really any classes at all.”
She then charmed the audience with some Czech words and phrases. “I think that being here that semester was one of the first inklings I had of myself as a director, because, as you saw from that, I made a whole lot of movies as an actress, and so far only two as a director,” she concluded. “It took me a while to realize that that was a better 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, maybe everyone else likes The Firemen’s Ball better. I like this better. This is my taste, and I kind of started 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 turns out I also like obscure Milos Forman movies, or one of them in particular.” Concluded Gyllenhaal: “That voice of going, ‘OK, this is me! This is what I like!’ is part of what pushed me to be a director to express my view of the world, however strange and challenging, and however different.”
The opening ceremony kicked off, as has become tradition, with the unveiling of the new KVIFF trailer, this year starring Stellan Skarsgård, and a big 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 all on-stage singers are big Czech stars. “But if they lived in 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 during 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 whole town were treated to a special musical show created by Czech DJ and producer NobodyListen, which brought together personalities from the contemporary Czech music scene spanning a range of genres and generations – including several musicians from Karlovy Vary itself.
The opening film and music show were not followed by the traditional Karlovy Vary midnight fireworks, but by what organizers have called the largest drone show ever to be staged in the Czech Republic or Slovakia. The 10-minute aerial display, entitled “Stars and Winners of Your Own Story,” saw a fleet of 1,300 synchronized drones transforming the night sky, including with such cinema-related images as a clapperboard, a movie camera and a red carpet.
