Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is the largest film festival in the Czech Republic and the most prestigious such festival in Central and Eastern Europe. It is one of the oldest A-list film festivals (i.e., non-specialized festivals with a competition for feature-length fiction films), a category it shares with the festivals in Cannes, Berlin, Venice, San Sebastian, Moscow, Montreal, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Among filmmakers, buyers, distributors, sales agents, and journalists, KVIFF is considered the most important event in all of Central and Eastern Europe.

Every year, the festival presents some 200 films from around the world, and regularly hosts famous and important filmmakers. The Karlovy Vary festival is intended for both film professionals and the general public, and offers visitors a carefully designed programme, excellent facilities and a broad range of other services.

Subscribe Share
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
  • Loveling

    Irene lives in a crumbling house on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro with her husband and four sons. Fernando, her eldest boy, is a local handball star, and when he’s scouted to play professionally in Germany, the family has only a few weeks to say goodbye. While his leaving comes as a shock, it a...

  • Conference

    Natalia, a nun from a remote Russian monastery, comes to Moscow 17 years after the terrorist attack on the Dubrovka Theatre. She has been sent there to organize a memorial evening for the victims of the attack that took place in October 2002. We soon learn that Natalia and her family were witness...

  • The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea

    In a small eel-farming town in western Greece, the solitary lives of two women unexpectedly intersect. Ten years after a botched anti-terrorism raid resulted in her relocation from Athens, Elisabeth is now the local chief of police and a heavy alcoholic. Rita is a quiet and mysterious eel-hatcher...

  • A White, White Day

    In a remote Icelandic town, a bereaved former police chief (Ingvar Sigurdsson) begins to suspect a local man of having had an affair with his late wife, who died two years earlier in a tragic accident. Gradually, his obsession with uncovering the truth begins to take over his life, leading to dan...

  • The Last Autumn

    Centuries ago, humans first arrived with their livestock on the isolated Icelandic coast – a remote land pushed up against the inhospitable Arctic Ocean that has been home to generations of farmers. Úlfar and Oddny, an aging Icelandic couple, are among this legacy, completely in rhythm with the l...

  • 1981

    This cheeky, coming-of-age comedy tells the story of 11-year-old Ricardo, who struggles to fit in at his new school in 1981. With a flare for inventiveness and a desperate desire to impress his classmates, Ricardo weaves a web of untruths, which he must carefully maintain to keep up appearances f...

  • All About Lily Chou Chou

    For young people around the world, music is often the only salvation when pain and suffering becomes too much to bear. Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) is in 8th grade and worships Lily Chou-Chou, a Björk-like singer whose lush and transcendent music provides the perfect escape from his brutal surroundin...

  • Amour Fou

    Alliance of Women Film Journalists Selection! Read an excerpt from Marilyn Ferdinand's AWFJ review: "The careful framing, gorgeous period settings, brilliantly orchestrated set-pieces, and vibrant colors of this film are a feast for the eyes, and I admired the subtle performances of this uniforml...

  • Boiling Point

    In enfant terrible Takeshi Kitano’s explosive second feature film, Masaki (Yûrei Yanagi) is an unassuming gas station attendant and amateur baseball player for underdog team The Eagles. After he enrages a local yakuza, setting off a feud between the gangsters and his coach, Masaki heads to Okinaw...

  • Corpo Celeste

    Alliance of Women Film Journalists Selection! Read an excerpt from Erin Trahan's AWFJ review: "If a cinematic canon were to prioritize an adolescent girl’s point of view, Alice Rohrwacher’s CORPO CELESTE from 2011 would top the list. The first of Rohrwacher’s several features as writer-director o...

  • Dede

    Based on true events during the outset of the Georgian Civil War, Dede takes place in the high mountainous community of Svaneti. Inside its strict patriarchal society, Dina is a young woman who is promised in marriage to David, one of the soldiers returning from war. Incapable of loving her betro...

  • Dreams of Dust

    Mocktar, a Nigerien peasant, comes looking for work in Essakane, a dusty gold mine in Northeast Burkina Faso, Africa, where he hopes to forget the past that haunts him. In Essakane, he quickly finds out, the gold rush ended twenty years before, and the inhabitants of this strange timeless wastela...

  • Grigris

    Despite a bum leg, 25-year-old Grigris has hopes of becoming a professional dancer, making some extra cash putting his killer moves to good use on the dance floor of his local club every weekend. His dreams are tested when his step-father falls critically ill and he's forced to risk his future by...

  • How I Ended This Summer

    On a desolate island in the Arctic Circle, two men work at a small meteorological station, taking readings from their radioactive surroundings. Sergei, a gruff professional in his fifties, takes his job very seriously. His new partner, bright eyed college grad Pavel, retreats to his MP3 player an...

  • Mellow Mud

    Seventeen-year-old Raya (Elina Vaska) and her younger brother, Robis, live under the guardianship of their bitter grandmother in rural Latvia. When the old woman suffers a fatal heart attack, Raya keeps her death a secret and assumes responsibility for the family’s orchard. Longing to escape her ...

  • Room 304

    From the producer of THE WHISTLEBLOWER and DIANA. Startling tales of sex, betrayal and corruption unravel in a Copenhagen hotel when disparate lives intersect in a twist of fate.

    DIRECTED BY BIRGITTE STAERMOSE
    DENMARK | 2011 | ENGLISH, DANISH AND GERMAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES

  • Room 514

    Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Best New Narrative film at the Tribeca Film Festival, ROOM 514 is a tense political thriller which has been called a "masterful project" by Indiewire. Anna, an investigator in the Israeli military, is ordered to interrogate a senior officer who is alleged to ...

  • Sweet Evil

    The mysterious fifteen-year-old runaway Céline infiltrates the home of the well-to-do Mr. and Mrs. Van Eyck. Though alarmed at first, they agree to let her stay indefinitely. Céline quickly ingratiates herself with the couple, but slowly her true intentions are revealed.

    DIRECTED BY OLIVIER COUS...

  • The Auction

    A man of few words, Gaby manages his family’s farm alone, despite his age. With no sons to speak of and two grown daughters far away in the big city, he spends his days tending to the farm, eschewing most social interactions. When his eldest daughter, Marie, appears at the family homestead to sha...

  • The Deflowering of Eva van End

    Every member of the van End family is dysfunctional in his or her own particular way. Trapped in the middle is the youngest, 15-year-old wallflower Eva, struggling for any attention or affection at all. When Veit, the perfect and Adonis-like German exchange student Eva invited, moves in, each me...

  • The Demons

    While Montreal is in the throes of a string of kidnappings targeting young boys, ten-year-old Félix (Édouard Tremblay-Grenier) is finishing his school year in the quiet suburbs. A sensitive child with a vivid imagination, Félix is afraid of nearly everything he observes. Little by little, his ima...

  • The Other Side

    In an invisible territory at the margins of society lives a wounded community who face the threat of being forgotten by political institutions and having their rights as citizens trampled. Disarmed veterans, taciturn adolescents, drug addicts trying to escape addiction through love; ex-special fo...

  • The Teacher

    Czechoslovakia, 1983. Middle school teacher Comrade Drazdechova (Zuzana Maurery, Best Actress winner at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival) greets her new students by asking each to announce what his or her parents do for a living. Soon, it becomes apparent that her pupils' grades are tied to how hel...

  • Vasermil

    Named after the local soccer stadium in the Southern Israeli town of Beer Sheba, VASERMIL tells the story of three teenagers from separate marginalized communities, who pin their hopes on soccer as a way out. Shlomi, Adiel and Dima are recruited by the coach of the local soccer team to take part ...