The Festival enjoyed a period of glory during the 1960s but suffered a decline during the “normalis-ation” period after the suppression of the Prague Spring, when it faced competition from the Moscow Film Festival (with which it was obliged to alternate, taking place every other year from 1959 to 1994).

While the Festival was organised by the state until 1992, it then gained independence with the newly established Karlovy Vary Film Festival Foundation, headed by popular Czech actor Jírí Bartoska. This independence was accompanied by the necessity for financial support from sponsors. Fortunately the popularity of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival has continued to grow since 1994, both in the Czech Republic and abroad. Every year at the beginning of July Karlovy Vary is visited by viewers from all over the Czech Republic, young people in particular, for whom the festival has practically become a cult venue.

The Festival naturally also lures hundreds of foreign guests, journalists, film critics, international film-club members, and each year brings greater numbers of foreign television crews, attracted by, among other things, the presence of stars such as Michael Douglas, Milos Forman, Mia Farrow, Gregory Peck, Lauren Bacall, Rod Steiger and many others.

The foreign community, especially from Western Europe and the US, welcomes the chance to see new works from the countries of the former Eastern bloc in the special section “East of the West.” And the section screening the latest Czech films is always guaranteed to generate lively interest. Visitors to the festival also look forward to the chance to see retrospective screenings and focuses (the screening of Australian films, the retrospectives on Antonin Artaud, Jean Epstein, Joris Ivens, Sergei Eisenstein and on Czech animated film enjoyed huge successes). Equally popular are the portraits of independent filmmakers including Olivier Assayas, Nick Gomez and Alejandro Agresti.

All eyes, however, will be on the international competition of feature-length films which, in accordance with international FIAPF regulations may only include films which have not appeared in official competition at other major film festivals. Thus the selection is naturally considerably reduced, in view of the leading position of the festivals at Cannes, Berlin and Venice. Nevertheless, the Festival is making great headway here, too, as testified to by the fact that each year many of the films shown in competition at Karlovy Vary are subsequently short-listed as Oscar or Golden Globe nominations (Sergei Bodrov’s Prisoner of the Mountains; and A Chef In Love by Nanna Djordjadze, awarded in 1996; Ma vie en rose by Alan Berliner, the winning film from 1997). The selectors for the competition programme also endeavour to attract as many works as possible from those countries whose films, with a few exceptions, are too frequently neglected at the festivals in Cannes, Berlin or Venice.

A number of reports on the 33rd Karlovy Vary IFF in 1998 stated that the standard of the films in competition now bears comparison with films awarded at other large international festivals, here included in the informative section Horizons. One of our great successes is the fact that, each year, we are witnessing an increase in the number of films which, after appearing at the Karlovy Vary IFF, have been successfully brought into distribution, whether for the broader distribution network, for film clubs or television viewers.

The 34th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, to be held 2-10 July 1999, will once again be the only FIAPF-accredited competitive festival in Central and Eastern Europe. The aim of the organisers is to maintain this status in future years, which will unquestionably prove to be an exacting task requiring our full commitment.