KVIFF Set to Award Maggie Gyllenhaal

At the opening ceremony of the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the President's Award will be presented to Golden Globe winner and two-time Academy Award nominee Maggie Gyllenhaal – an actress, director, producer, and screenwriter whose career is full of thought-provoking and groundbreaking work.

At the Karlovy Vary festival, Maggie Gyllenhaal will present her film The Bride! (2026), which she wrote, directed and produced. The film is an imaginative continuation of the classic Frankenstein story, influenced by both the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein and Mary Shelley’s original masterpiece. With Warner Brothers at the helm, the film stars Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Penélope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard and Jake Gyllenhaal.

Previously, Gyllenhaal made her feature directorial debut with her adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter, starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, and Jessie Buckley, for which she also wrote the screenplay. The film went on to be nominated for three Academy Awards for Best Actress (Colman), Best Supporting Actress (Buckley) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Gyllenhaal). The film also won Gyllenhaal three Independent Spirit Awards (Best Feature, Best Director and Best Screenplay); four Gotham Awards (Best Feature, Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award, Best Screenplay, Outstanding Lead Performance for Colman); The Venice Film Festival’s “Golden Osella” Award for Best Screenplay; a Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in First-Time Feature Film; and a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best First Film among many other wins and nominations. She was also named one of 2022’s Directors to Watch by both VARIETY and the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

Gyllenhaal won acclaim in 2002 for Secretary, starring opposite James Spader, for which she won a National Board of Review award and both Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Award nominations. She followed with Laurie Collyer’s Sherrybaby (2006), a painful look at a young woman getting out of prison and hoping to reclaim her child, which earned her a second Golden Globe nomination. Sherrybaby won the Crystal Globe for Best Film at the 2006 Karlovy Vary IFF, while the Best Actress Award was awarded to Maggie Gyllenhaal.

In 2009, she starred opposite Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, earning her an Oscar nomination. Other notable film performances include Donnie Darko (2001), Mona Lisa Smile (2003), Stranger Than Fiction (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), Nanny McPhee Returns (2010), Frank (2014) and The Kindergarten Teacher (2018) among many others.

Gyllenhaal moved into television with BBC/Sundance’s The Honourable Woman (2014), for which she won a Golden Globe Award and received SAG and Emmy nominations.  And in 2019, Gyllenhaal concluded her three-season run as the sex worker Candy who becomes a film director in the HBO drama The Deuce, which she also produced. Her performance earned her rave reviews, and both Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award nominations.

She’s equally at home on stage. She played Priscilla in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul (2004) in both Los Angeles and at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). She also starred as Yelena in Uncle Vanya (2009) and Masha in The Three Sisters (2011), both alongside her husband Peter Sarsgaard at the Classic Stage Company in New York City. She debuted on Broadway in Sam Gold’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing opposite Ewan McGregor in 2014.

She also collaborated with artist Matthew Barney on the experimental film River of Fundament in 2014, and her readings of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar can be heard on Audible.