Karlovy Vary by the Documentary Rupture of the Iron Curtain

synopsis

At the end of the 1940s, Czechoslovakia put itself on the festival map with the Karlovy Vary International Festival, the first editions of which also took place in Mariánské Lázně (1946–1949). However, one of the lesser-known facts from this prestigious festival’s history is that in the 1950s, it became a haven for filmmakers shooting documentaries on social unrest or communist internationalism in the West. The retrospective will remind us of Czechoslovakia’s ties to France, Italy and Germany precisely through the duality of this controversial gesture, which on the one hand linked the cultural policies of the communist parties across the Iron Curtain, and on the other hand exposed the isolationism of Czechoslovak documentary filmmaking, which ostentatiously ignored similar domestic protests on the authority of the Ministry of Information.

The screening will be accompanied by a discussion between Lucie Česálková, film historian Jindřiška Bláhová and international relations historian Daniela Kolenovská.

The discussion will be accompanied by these films: The Man We Love the Most, Something Changed in Midday, Long Live the Docker.