Colourful Karlovy Vary film festival in full swing

The 39th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is currently underway, with dozens of well-known actors and directors, hundreds of films and thousands of enthusiastic film fans making the festival one of the most colourful events in the Czech Republic.

Colourful Karlovy Vary film festival in full swing

Welcome ceremony of the 39th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, photo: CTK

The Karlovy Vary film festival attracts all kinds of people to this otherwise quiet west Bohemia spa town. You'll see everyone from film industry types being ferried around in limousines to young film enthusiasts bedding down outdoors in sleeping bags. Just about every film is sold out, and the changeable weather has not dampened spirits at one of THE events in the Czech cultural calendar.

The festival got underway with a glitzy opening ceremony on Friday night. Some of the stars of opening film The Boys from County Clare were in attendance, including Colm Meaney; some will know him from Irish films like the Dead and the Commitments, while others will recognise him as Chief Miles O'Brien from Star Trek, the Next Generation. How did he enjoy the opening ceremony?

"I was thrilled by the opening ceremony. I wasn't expecting the dancing girls, it was a wonderful show. It really set the tone and the mood for the evening. I loved their jingle, the short movie they had which was the jingle for the festival. Again I think it sets a lovely tone. It's about an accessible festival which is aimed at young people and young film makers, and I think that's terrifically exiting."

And the party afterwards? A long night?

Miroslav Ondricek, photo: CTK

"It was a very long night - Czech hospitality knows no bounds. We had a wonderful time. The Hotel Pupp is beautiful and people are incredibly generous. It was a beautiful party."

This festival here in Karlovy Vary is an 'A' list film festival, like Cannes or Berlin, but I'm sure it must be quite different in general from those festivals...

"Yeah, I'm just getting to know this festival a bit. What I really like about it is - because I think it's the important thing for festivals - is that it gets the public in to see films. Cannes does not do that very well, it's a very industry oriented festival. Venice a little less so, and Toronto is quite good at it.

"This festival seems to blend those things. As you say it's a very 'A' list festival, it feels very much like Cannes in many ways. But it manages to bring in regular punters as well; which is what you want, because it's very, very difficult to get the measure of a film, to understand what the response is going to be, if you just have industry people watching it."

During the opening ceremony two awards were presented for services to world cinema. The first was given to the much-respected Czech cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek, who has worked a lot with Milos Forman, on his early Czechoslovak films such as Fireman's Ball and Loves of a Blonde, as well as later movies such as Hair and the Oscar-winning Amadeus.

Vaclav Havel and his wife Dagmar, photo: CTK

The other special award went to the American acting great Harvey Keitel, who has been in some of Martin Scorcese's classic films such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, as well as, in more recent times, movies like the Piano and Pulp Fiction. He told a remarkable story about, how as a young actor in New York, he and some colleagues had signed a petition in protest at the treatment of Vaclav Havel by the Communist authorities in Czechoslovakia.

"It was in the late '60s or '70s and this gentleman who headed one of the most important theatres in New York City, the New York Public Theatre, Joseph Papp, asked a bunch of us from the theatre community to sign a petition that would be delivered to the Czech[oslovak] Embassy, to petition the release of this Czech playwright, Vaclav Havel.

"Allen Ginsberg was there and Robert De Niro, Kevin Kline I remember. Joseph Papp knocked on the door of the embassy and the door opened, a hand reached out, we never saw the face, and took the petition, closed the door. Joseph Papp and a few other people started banging on the door again, and the door didn't open up.

"I never dreamt that that playwright would change the government of a nation, nor that I would wind up one day in the Czech Republic, accepting an award for my work. That was the long connection, and I felt this visit to the Czech Republic was a culmination of that long-ago association with Czechoslovakia, at the time."