42nd Annual KVIFF 2007
The last few days, I had quite an interesting and great experience in that I was able to visit for 3 days the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (www.kviff.com/en)which is held in Karlovy Vary (a city of natural springs which I had already visited twice before) every summer. If you've heard of the great film festival in Cannes, France... this would be maybe the similar idea, although I'm sure that the one in France is much much bigger than this one. But this one was still really freakin huge and it really made the city a lively and fun place to be. There were all these films playing there from all these places around the world and it was absolutely amazing. I, myself, was able to view I think 5 films, and some of them were quite good.
Famous people at this years festival (of whom I didn't see ever) are Danny DeVito and Renee Zelwegger. There's some famous people each year at the festival. It was quite an adventure we had as we went. Let me paint a picture for you of our extreme extravaganza...
So... we went to Karlovy Vary. It's quite difficult to get there since everyone is going there even though they have buses that go every half hour, but nevertheless, after a few hours of waiting, we were finally on a bus bound for KV. We got there at about midnight on Friday and went to buy our passes. It's funny, because we weren't really sure about which films were playing and we had to decide which films we wanted to see for the following day, so we just chose some films which still had some free places and went and saw them. They were quite good actually, so it was a satisfying feeling. We stayed at this "campsite" because it only cost about 3 bucks a night, and comparing that to the expensive hotels in which there weren't any free rooms, this was yet another satifying moment when we got there. How did we arrive at the campsite? Well... the next cool thing is that there are free buses during this festival and one of the buses goes directly there, about 8 minutes only, which is funy since they advertise the campsite as being only a 10 minute walk from the center, in reality, I figure they meant a 10 minute fast cheetah-like run, but it was ok, since the buses were quite regular. Oh yea... the campsite wasn't really a campsite. It was actually a stadium... something similar to a high school football field with a track around it... you know? Ok... and there were tents all up in the middle of the field. So we paid our dues and went to set up ground for the evening. We all finally got everything set up and went in for a good snoozin for the evening.
The first day of films was quite nice. We saw films, walked around. Saw festivalish-type stuff and enjoyed the city. It's actually a quite beautiful city (although the city is run by the Russian mafia. It has really quite a large Russian population in the city, and a lot of things are run by them... Anyways, so it's a beautiful city and just a great place to be, especially during the festival.
The second day was a beautiful day, marked by some most beautiful moments. We woke up on Sunday and realized there happened to be more people here at the campground/stadium than previously. Come to find out, there just so happens to be a big sick market at the stadium every Sunday, and you just come here and walk around and buy anything from moonshoes, to electrical outlets, to tires, to panties to kittens. It was an interesting sight. It's like everyone brought their garage sale to the same place and everything is just run a muck. But really there were hundreds upon hundreds of people here. So that was a pleasant surprise. Next big thing? Hm... so we came to the festival and realized that we left our tickets back at the campgrounds and they wouldn't let us in... so that sucked... Next, we came back and could get the tickets and make it back in time for the next film. We can back, got the tickets, and came back to the festival. We arrive at the next cinema and get our tickets out only to realize that apparently the tickets had fallen out somewhere along the way. So... all the tickets we got for that day were no good. (We found out later that the tix had actually fallen out in the tent before we left. Oh well... cuz we all enjoyed a fun time in the city without films for a while and we were actually able to get into some other movies that day which were acutally a lot better than the ones that we had been planning on seeing. So it all worked out in the end, but oh well. We listened to some big singers that evening who were holding a concert and it was just an extremely fun and happy weekend. I really can't explain it better than that. It was a really fun time with lots of good memories.
For the next 3 or 4 days I'm gonna be at my friends cottage down in the mountains in southern CZ so hopefully I'll get back to tell you about more relaxing moments of me during my holidays. Ok, hope things are good and have a good day. peace for now.
Famous people at this years festival (of whom I didn't see ever) are Danny DeVito and Renee Zelwegger. There's some famous people each year at the festival. It was quite an adventure we had as we went. Let me paint a picture for you of our extreme extravaganza...
So... we went to Karlovy Vary. It's quite difficult to get there since everyone is going there even though they have buses that go every half hour, but nevertheless, after a few hours of waiting, we were finally on a bus bound for KV. We got there at about midnight on Friday and went to buy our passes. It's funny, because we weren't really sure about which films were playing and we had to decide which films we wanted to see for the following day, so we just chose some films which still had some free places and went and saw them. They were quite good actually, so it was a satisfying feeling. We stayed at this "campsite" because it only cost about 3 bucks a night, and comparing that to the expensive hotels in which there weren't any free rooms, this was yet another satifying moment when we got there. How did we arrive at the campsite? Well... the next cool thing is that there are free buses during this festival and one of the buses goes directly there, about 8 minutes only, which is funy since they advertise the campsite as being only a 10 minute walk from the center, in reality, I figure they meant a 10 minute fast cheetah-like run, but it was ok, since the buses were quite regular. Oh yea... the campsite wasn't really a campsite. It was actually a stadium... something similar to a high school football field with a track around it... you know? Ok... and there were tents all up in the middle of the field. So we paid our dues and went to set up ground for the evening. We all finally got everything set up and went in for a good snoozin for the evening.
The first day of films was quite nice. We saw films, walked around. Saw festivalish-type stuff and enjoyed the city. It's actually a quite beautiful city (although the city is run by the Russian mafia. It has really quite a large Russian population in the city, and a lot of things are run by them... Anyways, so it's a beautiful city and just a great place to be, especially during the festival.
The second day was a beautiful day, marked by some most beautiful moments. We woke up on Sunday and realized there happened to be more people here at the campground/stadium than previously. Come to find out, there just so happens to be a big sick market at the stadium every Sunday, and you just come here and walk around and buy anything from moonshoes, to electrical outlets, to tires, to panties to kittens. It was an interesting sight. It's like everyone brought their garage sale to the same place and everything is just run a muck. But really there were hundreds upon hundreds of people here. So that was a pleasant surprise. Next big thing? Hm... so we came to the festival and realized that we left our tickets back at the campgrounds and they wouldn't let us in... so that sucked... Next, we came back and could get the tickets and make it back in time for the next film. We can back, got the tickets, and came back to the festival. We arrive at the next cinema and get our tickets out only to realize that apparently the tickets had fallen out somewhere along the way. So... all the tickets we got for that day were no good. (We found out later that the tix had actually fallen out in the tent before we left. Oh well... cuz we all enjoyed a fun time in the city without films for a while and we were actually able to get into some other movies that day which were acutally a lot better than the ones that we had been planning on seeing. So it all worked out in the end, but oh well. We listened to some big singers that evening who were holding a concert and it was just an extremely fun and happy weekend. I really can't explain it better than that. It was a really fun time with lots of good memories.
For the next 3 or 4 days I'm gonna be at my friends cottage down in the mountains in southern CZ so hopefully I'll get back to tell you about more relaxing moments of me during my holidays. Ok, hope things are good and have a good day. peace for now.
posted by Zach Barnes at 10:15 AM
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