Friday, April 13 marked the death of Miloš Forman, grand filmmaker, recipient of two Academy Awards for Best Director, and friend and supporter of the Karlovy Vary festival. Thanks to his help in its early years, the festival was able to attract interesting guests, including actor and producer Michael Douglas and actor Woody Harrelson. Miloš Forman also backed the festival’s organization team in the late 1990s when an existential threat to the festival arose in the form of Prague‘s Golden Golem fest. “At the time, Miloš Forman and Mia Farrow wrote a lovely letter for us, which included the sentence: You survived Moscow, you’ll survive the Golem as well. He was our ambassador, and his support – not only at that time but in many other years as well – was essential,” says president Jiří Bartoška, recalling Forman’s help with the Karlovy Vary festival.
Miloš Forman received the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema in 1997. He was most recently a guest of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 2009 when his picture A Walk Worthwhile screened here as a world premiere. Miloš Forman and his connection to the festival will continue on through re-screenings of one of the festival’s very first trailers, in which he starred.
“Miloš Forman is simply unforgettable. He will always be here. Every time you say his name, you remember the stories he told in his unmistakably deep voice, his laughter, the smoke from his cigar ever hanging in the air. But his films are what will truly remain. Miloš achieved what no other Czech filmmaker ever has: He belonged to the world,” says KVIFF president Jiří Bartoška.
