What I learned attending the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (twice)
/I’ve been out of the country for a few weeks visiting the Czech Republic, building the trip around attending the 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. This was my second time at KVIFF; we had such a great time attending just a few days of the festival back in 2018 that we decided to spend a full week this time. That’s not ultimately how it worked out, for reasons that had (almost) nothing to do with the festival itself.
Since I knew nothing about international film festivals until I started going to Karlovy Vary, I want to share some lessons that I’ve learned. I hope some of these will be even be applicable to other major film festivals, since I think they’re all more or less run by the same people.
Scheduling and transportation
Film festivals are great to plan travel around, because they’re scheduled long in advance and they’re always in the same locations, so you can start looking for award flights and hotel stays far in advance. Next year’s KVIFF is July 4-12.
I did not start looking very far in advance, but was still able to book economy award seats to Prague on Icelandair using 35,000 Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles and $228.15 in cash, and return flights from Prague in Aer Lingus business class for 55,000 Mileage Plan miles and $57.90.
Since we were flying in the first day of the festival, we walked to the public bus stop at Prague’s Ruzyně and took the 100 bus to the Zličin metro stop about 20 minutes away, then got on the 305 bus to Karlovy Vary’s Tržnice bus station, which took a little over 2 hours. You can tap to pay on both busses (and indeed, every form of transit we took), so we didn’t need to futz with the ticket machines. There’s a zone-based system outside of Prague proper, and Karlovy Vary is in zone 13, so the bus from Zličin cost 140 CZK, or about $6.
I know Europeans love taking busses everywhere, but we’re not Europeans, so we took the train back, departing from Karlovy Vary’s Horní train station (the Dolní station closer to the center of town runs a service train up to the Horní station but we just took a 5 minute bus ride from the city center). The train takes a much more circuitous path than the bus, so the return trip took about 3 hours and 15 minutes, and cost 498 CZK, or $21.31. If you’re going straight back to the airport from Karlovy Vary, then taking the reverse of our bus route would almost certainly be more convenient.
Where to stay
Our first trip to Karlovy Vary in 2018 was a bit spur of the moment, so finding decent hotels was a struggle. We ended up staying at a kind of quaint converted mansion or palace some ways up one of the hills surrounding the festival area. The hill ended up being an annoyance, since every trip back to the room would leave us soaked in sweat (KVIFF is in July, after all).
So this time, I focused on hotels directly along the river Teplá, which runs through the festival area. I found what seemed like a terrific deal at the Park Spa Hotel Sirius (you can read my 2/10 review there): $1422.78 for 7 nights, with full board and a spa package. The rate was so low I assumed they didn’t realize the film festival was taking place or they would have hiked the rate, since the front door practically opens onto the main festival grounds, with a great view from the windows.
Well, it turns out this was a huge mistake. Not because of anything the hotel did or didn’t do, but because every single night of the festival there was a DJ spinning in the center of the main festival grounds until 3 am. The ones right outside the windows of our room. We tolerated this for 5 nights, but at that point had slept so little and seen so many movies we decided to pack it in and head to Prague.
In short, my solemn recommendation is to not stay at any hotel or apartment facing the river during the festival. Either go a little up the hill from the river like we did on our first trip, or stay outside the resort area in the more commercial or residential parts of town a block or two from the river.
Paid tickets
It is possible to just show up to the festival and buy movie tickets, and I suspect that there are people who take day trips from Prague just to experience the atmosphere and see whichever movie they can get tickets to. I’m not sure how far in advance paid tickets can be purchased, since we’ve never gotten tickets that way. Paid tickets can be purchsaed from box offices scattered around the festival grounds.
Festival passes (1)
For both of our trips, we bought festival passes, which give you a little more control over which films you get to see, although not all that much more.
Festival passes can only be purchased in-person once you arrive in Karlovy Vary. There’s no way to buy them online or in advance. We arrived in the early afternoon and bought our passes immediately, although I had them activated for the day after we arrived, so we did not end up seeing any movies on the day of arrival. This was revealed to be a minor error, because of the way passes are used to reserve tickets.
Once you have one or more active passes, you can load them into the KVIFF smartphone app. I recommend downloading the app in advance and creating your account, but my partner and I both had to delete and reinstall the app for it to function properly (a belated realization that led to another missed half-day). Importantly, you can load more than one pass into the app, so you can reserve multiple seats for the same movie. For showings with assigned seating, I believe the app tries to find seats together when you do this.
Each day at 7 am, reservations become available for films showing the following day. It’s worth describing the rhythm of how this works: before you go to bed on Monday, you look at the schedule for Wednesday for every movie you’d even slightly be interested in seeing. Then you set an alarm for 6:55 am. At 7 am Tuesday morning, you open the app and request 3 reservations for those Wednesday movies. Then, you wait, because everyone else in Karlovy Vary is doing the exact same thing. As the server resolves each request, you’ll be told whether your reservation was successful. If not, you can put in another request, although by 7:30 or so most in-demand reservations will have been taken.
Each pass allows you to hold 3 successful reservations per day, and you can make as many requests as you want until you reach that limit. It was unclear to me from the instructions whether a canceled reservation would “free up” that slot or if once a request was successful that slot was permanently used up.
Let me be clear: you will not get your top three choices every day. If you are lucky, you’ll get one of your top three choices every day. More people want to see each film than there are reservations available, and this is the way those reservations are rationed.
Once you’ve successfully made a reservation, you can pick up the paper tickets from any box office using your physical festival pass.
Festival passes (2)
A second way to get tickets using your festival pass is to go to the box office and see what they have available for sale. Your pass gets you unlimited free tickets from the box offices for showings each day and the following day. Lines are often very, very long when the box offices open at 7 am, but if you’re up at 6:55 anyway in order to make reservations, you may as well be standing in line too. We did not try to get tickets this way at 7 am, but after the lines died down we did check whether there were any more tickets available, and there always were, although again, not to the most in-demand showings.
Festival passes (3)
Finally, there is yet another way to use festival passes to see films (and attend other events, like press conferences): outside each theater and event space there is a roped off line or holding area, where passholders who don’t have tickets can wait until 5-10 minutes before the event starts, when enough people are admitted to fill the empty seats.
For major movie premiers, this is likely the only way you will be able to attend, so if there’s one movie you absolutely have to see during the festival, plan on staking out a place in line at least an hour or so before it’s scheduled to begin.
Disneyworld for adults
Those are the logistics. What is the festival actually like? It’s an amusement park built into a fully functioning city. The main attractions are the rides — the films being shown all around town. There are screenings in huge corporate auditoriums, stately imperial opera houses, hotel ballrooms, and medium-sized side rooms (the main building of the festival is a hotel and conference center the rest of the year).
Besides the rides, there are also meet-and-greets: press briefings and panel discussions about the films being screened.
There’s a fair amount of amusement park food being sold from kiosks around the festival, all of which I tasted was excellent. There are also beer and cocktail kiosks. Everything was reasonably priced, presumably because the rest of the city was operating as usual so there weren’t any obvious price-gouging opportunities, except the gift shop, where we happily spent money restocking our dated KVIFF gear.
This analogy kept returning to me over the 5 days we were there, spurred by something I remember a Disney hacker saying years ago: people who go to Disneyworld without putting in the work to plan their stay get frustrated, but what other trip would you spend $10,000 on and just show up for a week hoping everything will work out?
There were some genuine pain points at KVIFF. The fact that the app needed to be reinstalled wasn’t something we could have predicted in advance and put a real cramp on our first 24 hours in town. The fact that our hotel was so incompatible with sleep that we had to leave early is something we can account for in the future by staying further from the main drag.
But a lot of the annoyances are just how the festival works, and if you want to see any films at the festival, you have to adjust to the requirements, primarily waking up in time to put in your reservation requests, and having an open mind about which films you’re willing to watch. Once we got the hang of it, we didn’t have any trouble seeing 2-3 films each remaining day we were in town.
Conclusion
I think part of the glamour of the film festival circuit is the overwhelming feeling that it’s not about you, the public, and the festival does a good job playing up this feeling. Before each film there’s a brief spot highlighting an event from the previous day, like a movie premier or a gala event, lifetime achievement awards, things of that nature, and all the footage is shot right where you’re sitting, or where you’ll be sitting tomorrow, which gives a sense of proximity to fame and power.
These festivals are, after all, basically trade shows where venders show off their latest projects hoping for bids from investors and distributors, but the venders and investors are household names, at least to people who follow the film industry enough to go to a film festival. The fact that they let the public in at all is a kind of cross-subsidy to get the movers and shakers in the same place, while the real action takes place in the suites upstairs.
Like if Disney’s corporate headquarters were underneath Splash Mountain and they used ticket revenue to pay their power bill.
