How did you feel in Brno, the city of your student years?
It was wonderful, we played in the Scala cinema, which belongs to the university, and I remember it from my student years as the Moskva cinema. And at the beginning I said, among other things, that it strongly reminds me of Karlovy Vary, where the Grand Hotel Pupp was also called Moscow, and I am glad that it is Scala and Pupp again.
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You also attended the world premiere of the documentary Mecca, which was originally supposed to be performed at a large festival…
It was on Wednesday in Prague and it was an experience also thanks to what Mecca is, ie Miroslav Žbirka, a person. The film is beautiful, the discussion was wonderful and in short, it all runs very nicely. My colleagues Kryštof Mucha, Karel Och and others visited about 46 cities and it was just as good on them everywhere.
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It is said that everything bad is good for something, and this year’s need to do a festival differently has its two main positives. On the one hand, people in the 96 cities soak up the atmosphere of a regular festival through the festival editor we run before each film, and maybe some of them will go to Vary for a year.
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And the second positive is that I am convinced that the city of Karlovy Vary has realized what it means to have or not have a festival. And that it does not fall from the sky.
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In addition, this replacement event was a success, people went…
It is an absolute success. When deciding what to offer people, when we had to cancel the festival, we did not expect 96 cinemas to join Tady Vary, we thought that we would be satisfied with thirty or forty! And this year’s mugs and other merchandising items are also selling well, Thermal even ordered them so they were disassembled so quickly. People want to have a memory, it’s just a little happening, a special event that – hopefully – won’t have to happen again.
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What will be in November 54 ½. year of the Karlovy Vary IFF?
Autumn will be beautiful, we just have to have scarves. In the non-competitive show, we will screen 50 films in all the usual Karlovy Vary cinemas, it will be a more adult show than Tady Vary in your cinema, such as, say, pubertal. And then on July 2nd to 10th, 2021, we will prepare again a full-fledged adult festival, a personality to which the audience is accustomed.
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You will be invited to 54 ½. year foreign guests?
It would probably not be sensible, the virus is still around the world, the situation is changing rapidly and people are, of course, still careful. For example, I was supposed to go to Israel in the summer for Czech Film Week – and it won’t be, the measures have tightened again. But we already had beautiful telebridges at Tady Vary, people were on camera, entering the program online, so they still met the audience.
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