The festival opens with our opening night gala screening of The Hastrman, a debut film from renowned jazz singer and actor Ondřej Havelka and one of the most invigorating fractured fairy tales – the celebrated novel of the same name by Miloš Urban. The closing night event commemorates the late Miloš Forman with a screening of The Firemen’s Ball (1967), the last film Forman shot in his native country before exiling himself to the United States and multiple Oscar glories. 

In partnership with The Melbourne Cinémathèque, the festival will be co-presenting this year’s major retrospective of the legendary, groundbreaking Czech filmmaker Věra Chytilová. Dubbed “the first lady of Czech film”, the famously combative director will forever rank amongst cinema’s most uncompromising and protean iconoclasts. Her masterpieces Daisies (1966) and Fruit of Paradise (1969) rank among the films most emblematic of the freedoms afforded artists by the Prague Spring and will screen alongside several lesser-seen films across a three-week program.

Further tapping into this year’s theme, the festival also celebrates all that bubbles up in the effervescent spa town of Karlovy Vary, host to the Czech Republic’s renowned A-list international film festival. Film Spa (2015) is a documentary on the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), made to celebrate its belated 50th edition in 2015. 

Fresh imports from this year’s KVIFF showing at CaSFFA include Tomáš Pavlíček's Bear with Us (2018), a lovely comedy in which a fragmented family return to their weekend cottage one last time, screening alongside Domestique by Adam Sedlák (2018), an extraordinary KVIFF Main Competition title and a masterly, minimalist chamber drama of constantly ratcheting intensity and corporeal anxiety. Other program highlights include animated feature The Oddsockeaters (2016), where rival gangs of colourful creatures who make socks disappear wreak family-friendly havoc in Prague, and Gyorgy Kristof's Out (2017), an absurdist odyssey across Eastern Europe about a middle-aged man seeking better prospects abroad. This is in addition to Barefoot (2017), a  comedic drama set during the final days of WWII and the final film of Oscar winner Jan Svěrák’s “Czech Quartet", and Backstage (2018), Andrea Sedláčková’s latest film set in the world of  modern dance competitions made in Slovak-Czech co-production.

In a year in which momentous anniversaries abound, the festival is screening a range of archival titles that emerged from the Czechoslovak New Wave including 322 (1969), a semi-documentary of late 1960s society which tied for the Grand Prix at the 1969 Mannheim Film Festival; Celebration in the Botanical Garden (1969), in which a wanderer inspires a riotous bacchanale in a village in the Little Carpathians, and the digital restoration of All My Good Countrymen (1968), a Best Director winner at Cannes in 1969, which charts more than a decade of post-WWII life in a Moravian village.

The festival will also screen a package of three brilliant documentaries that pay tribute to the key events of 1918 and 1968, including the essential Oratorio for Prague. These screenings will be complemented by the 1918 – 1968 digital exhibition that offers comprehensive insights into the key personalities, events and many beginnings and endings that shaped Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1968.