It’s a year of big change for the Karlovy Vary Film Festival industry program. This year, the program will take place longer – between July 6 and 9, adding an additional day – and will focus on Central Europe, including an update of its promised Eastern platform. Another key change includes expanding the program’s range to include the small screen, with a series of activities dedicated to the development of the series.
Speak with Variety Before the edition of this year, the head of the Hugo Rosák industry office says he is “pleasant to get out of the routine” with new initiatives. “We are all part of a certain ecosystem, and within this ecosystem, we play a role. Whenever we realize that the system changes and we are no longer useful, I think it is important to look back and better understand how things can be improved so that we can always be relevant. ”
The chief of the industry says that he is aware that “everything is not perfect” and that the festival must treat him “as a pilot year and, hopefully, some of these changes will prove to work”.
Among the key changes of this year, the end of previous jobs in progress, replaced by the shop window of the central scene focused on Eastern Europe, an initiative created by the Office of the film industry of the Festival in cooperation with the National Film Institutes of Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenians, Ukraine. With this, the arguments are abandoned in favor of interactive talks to focus on the landscape of co -production of participating countries.
“Our experience in recent years has shown an increasingly strong drop in the way our audience has attended some of the work during presentation,” said Rosák de The Change. “This reflected a post-loss situation in the film industry, but also the fact that international sales have trouble finding projects, which means that they are traveling less. Or sales officers are already in contact with many producers because they follow many projects at a much earlier stage. ”
The head adds that it takes “a lot of efforts” to organize a window of the work in progress to ensure that it is a “relevant” event for the people of the room. “We saw that it started to work less, and we estimated that it was time to find a way to fight against the role that the festival could play. This element of conservation of something for an entire large region of Eastern Europe is something that we did very well 20 years ago, but it was now time to think about the possibility of being useful or making good quality projects that would suit conservation. ”
“In the end, we also had this internal feeling of, ok, it costs us a lot of energy and a lot of money,” he said. “Perhaps we have to find a way to finance and relevance for projects that seek to be funded and which are in a more fragile state, this is how we developed the central scene of Kviff.”
Following a trend on other key markets, the Karlovy Vary industry branch enters series and television thanks to a partnership with the media companies in Central Europe. In addition to a dedicated program of windows, panels, workshops and discussions on small players from July 8 and 9, the festival will host the Pop-up series incubator, a new series development program designed to support European producers and screenwriters. Organized by Tatino Films, the eight -month program ends in a festival tuning session, followed by organized matches of matches with financiers and producers.
“For us, this is a new path but at the same time very logical because the filmmakers and the creatives are now working on many different types of media,” explains Rosák to enter the Sphere series. “On the industry side, it can be less important to focus on the product than to focus on how people meet and exchange ideas. As an industry center for central Europe, it is natural that we also focus on television formats and try to solve some of the problems on the industry side to different value chains. ”
How has this new format changed the frequentation of the industry program so far? “The number of sales [agents] fell, “replies the head.” It is now more focused on producers, which is interesting. I do not observe the guests closely this year because it is a year of change and I think it will adapt slowly. I think it’s perfectly good to leave it for a few years and see how this idea of a hub changes.
“This year, there is also a big change in the audiovisual field in the Czech Republic with the new audiovisual law, which also includes series and games,” he adds. “We are in a transition as an indebtedness as a whole, so I think that responding to this transition open and willing to accept different ways and not dwelling on tradition is the way to help us better and be more relevant.”
