Everytime (2026)

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival has walked an improbable path of occupation, compromise, and survival. Its first edition was held in 1946, the year after Czechoslovakia was restored from Nazi rule and weeks before the first Cannes Film Festival. By 1958, after a coup and ten years of state communism, it was designated a category-A film festival by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations—the tier denoting the highest level of international impact. The next year, the Soviet Union dictated that Karlovy Vary take place on alternating years with the Moscow International Film Festival until 1994, two years after its host country had become the independent Czech Republic. This year’s “Vary Special” festival celebrates sixty editions in the course of eighty years.

With its spa-town setting and versatile program, KVIFF is comfortable with its own eclecticism. It is a proudly progressive European festival that preserves certain aesthetic features of its Communist-era inheritance while discarding the ideological baggage—the Brutalist façade of its headquarters, the Hotel Thermal, gives the festival the nostalgic vibe of a sanatorium. The booking cap of three tickets per day discourages attendees from overloading themselves, though there’s plenty to see: regional debuts of highlights from Sundance, Berlinale, and Cannes on one half of the menu; Eastern European deep cuts, new and old, on the other.

Tainted Horseplay (1988)

It was only my third time at the festival, but KVIFF is so rich in traditions that they already feel familiar. Signature among them are the brisk black-and-white festival trailers, directed by Ivan Zachariáš, played prior to screenings: eccentric short films that feature celebrity recipients of the festival’s Crystal Globe award. In one, robbers try to steal Mel Gibson’s award and get punished with a blowgun, while another sees Stellan Skarsgård go fishing with the statuette as bait, saving the worm for his own enjoyment. Another beloved ritual comes courtesy of artistic director Karel Och, who programs one Cassavetes film every edition, a multi-year master class on a director he adores.

This year, I sacrificed my seat for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) to attend the retrospective devoted to the festival’s anniversary, Out of the Past – KVIFF 60/80. The section gathered milestone films from Karlovy Vary’s history. Powell and Pressburger’s fabulist war melodrama, A Matter of Life and Death (1946), reached Czechoslovak audiences not long after the Nazi occupation ended. The retrospective also revisited key winners of the festival’s centerpiece prize, the Crystal Globe, from renowned Czechoslovak duo Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos for their courtroom drama The Defendant (1964), to Ken Loach, returning after his debut Poor Cow (1968) to win for Kes (1970), just after the Prague Spring. “Out of the Past” also remembered once-suppressed directors like Juraj Jakubisko, whose Birds, Orphans and Fools (1969) remained censored and shelved until 1990, and attested to KVIFF’s long-standing appetite for cinema far beyond the Bloc with selections like Barravento (1962), the debut of Brazilian Cinema Novo pioneer Glauber Rocha. The festival also brought world premieres of two digitally restored gems. The hottest repertory tickets seemed to be an ultra-crisp version of Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000), which debuted in the packed Grand Hall, and a restoration of Věra Chytilová’s psychosexual tragicomedy of the AIDS era, Tainted Horseplay (1988).

A Man of His Time (2026)

In between the classics, I also caught two loud Cannes films with time in the title, A Man of His Time and Everytime, both deserving all of yours. The former, by Emmanuel Marre, proved too magnetic to mind the 155 minutes in the sublimely bizarre screening hall, where massive crystal chandeliers hang above rows of black stacking chairs. The seating discomfort registered as a somatic complement to the political contortions of the film’s protagonist, Henri, who crawls up the Vichy regime over the last bits of his compromised morality. It is an acutely relevant portrait of creeping fascism, in which the right combination of ambition and mediocrity can guarantee a position, and a paycheck. Olivier Boonjing’s fly-on-the-wall cinematography mirrors Henri’s position; the camera is stationary in the corner, observing every move and glance as he becomes another cog in the Holocaust machine. Swann Arlaud, in his most paradoxically entrancing role yet, balances charisma and ignorance into an ambivalence that sustains the film, even if it does not venture far beyond a familiar tale of evil’s banality.

Sandra Wollner’s quietly miraculous Everytime opens on a Berlin family, a single mother and two charming daughters, about to depart for the breezy island of Tenerife, which they will reach later, in different company. Even though the twist arrives early, I won’t spoil it. The film knows how to frame the elusiveness of irreversible change by setting a hallucinogenic register against urban realism. Comparisons to Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun (2022) are unavoidable—the films share both a cinematographer, Gregory Oke, and themes of childhood grief—but Wollner’s choices are bolder and more inventive. In this memory piece, she trusts fiction to soothe the wounds opened up by brutal reality.

Lover, Not a Fighter (2026)

KVIFF has two competitive sections that have evolved alongside the festival, and I dug halfway into each. One of them, Proxima, is celebrating another unofficial anniversary. The section was reframed five years ago to showcase up-and-coming voices in cinema, replacing East of the West, which was solely devoted to Eastern European filmmakers. Now geographically borderless, Proxima remains tuned to youthful artistic spirit. The film that most successfully embodied this premise took home the Grand Prix: Lover, Not a Fighter, the debut feature by Slovak director Martina Buchelová. Her 20-year-old protagonist, Andrej, drinks and vibes harder than he looks for work, until a special girl, Miša, appears on the horizon. Their romance is hampered by his self-destructive streak, and meanwhile, her father is preparing to move their family into a bunker. Buchelová deploys an impressively scrappy, fragmented montage of vertical phone footage, with reflexive one-liners subtitled over the image; it’s a lot to digest at first, but the film quickly lures you in with a sense of intimacy as if it were the love story of your old friends.

Black Money for White Nights (2026)

Elsewhere, the Crystal Globe competition focused on filmmakers at later stages of their career and was even more global in scope. Fruit Gathering, Aung Phyoe’s tender romance between two seamstresses in Yangon, Myanmar, claimed the top prize, and Slovak auteur Ivan Ostrochovský’s Only Beautiful Things to Look At won the FIPRESCI prize. But nothing could compare to Black Money for White Nights, a film by Bulgarian duo Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov. An elderly couple, Marina and Gosha, a maternity nurse and a train dispatcher, have spent a lifetime pocketing tiny bribes at work in order to save for a dream trip to St. Petersburg to witness the city’s famed “white nights.” Their last banknote arrives just as Russia launches its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the tour firm collecting their cash conveniently, and suspiciously, insists that no war can hinder their dream. The couple chooses to believe them, turning the volume down on the television news.

Some colleagues framed the film as an exposé of Bulgarian corruption, which is a stretch to my eye. Black Money is rather a witty fable about the illusion of distancing oneself from politics, and how life comes to collect the karmic debt in painful installments of betrayal, violence, and self-disappointment. The film’s televisual aesthetics, defined by its high-key lighting and intense chromatic palette, express the couple’s inner language. They are taken in by a romanticized postcard of Soviet Russia, and the film relishes underlining this anachronism with brazenly literal set design, nowhere more so than in their living room wallpapered with images of birch forests. Those trees, planted in their minds by the likes of Aleksandr Pushkin and Sergei Esenin, are felled by contemporary realities, tumbling down onto the couple’s heads.

Black Money for White Nights won no prize, perhaps because its themes directly invoke the context that underpins the festival’s history. The film nonetheless provided a perfect coda to a festival that has long since reclaimed its communist inheritance on its own terms, proof of what can grow when one dares to reconsider one’s own past.