It was a historic scene at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, when Czech filmmaker Zuzana Kirchnerová climbed the stairs of the Lumière Theater for the premiere of her long-gestating debut feature “Caravan,” the first time in more than three decades that a Czech majority production played in the French fest’s official selection.
While the Cannes triumph was a crowning moment for the debutante director, it also marked the latest in a series of watershed achievements for the Czech industry. Beyond the Croisette, Czech directors are becoming a staple at prestigious festivals, including Venice, Berlin and Annecy, reflecting a steady growth arguably not seen in the Central European nation since the glory days of the Czech New Wave.
“I feel there’s real movement in the right direction,” says “Caravan” producer Dagmar Sedláčková. “That kind of consistency speaks to a maturation of the industry — better developed scripts, more precise direction and a willingness to push boundaries.”
Credit goes in no small part to the Czech government, which this year introduced a sweeping overhaul to its audiovisual law and a transformation of the Czech Audiovisual Fund — what culture minister Martin Baxa describes as “a crucial step towards strengthening the development of the Czech audiovisual industry.”
Among the key provisions for Czech filmmakers is an expansion of the government’s selective funding scheme to include support for series, animation and digital productions, alongside dramatic changes to how the fund is financed that Czech officials say will make the system more sustainable moving forward.
“We have succeeded in establishing a growth-oriented system — the more successful Czech audiovisual production becomes, the more support it will receive, and the more funding will be available for film incentives,” Baxa says.
The move to shore up domestic funding comes as an emerging generation of Czech directors and producers is increasingly “thinking beyond borders,” according to Sedláčková. “Many of them have studied or worked abroad, and they’re not trying to copy international models; they’re building stories that are deeply personal but still speak to wider audiences.”
To the industry’s credit, it’s not simply a case of Czech filmmakers looking outward. “Big sales agents are looking at the Czech Republic and are doing collaborations which they were never doing in the past 20 years,” says multi-hyphenate Matěj Chlupáček, who produced Kristina Dufková’s Annecy-premiering animated feature “Living Large.” “The fact that we are finally able to make a deal with international sales and festival managers before we start shooting the film is completely changing the system.”
Chlupáček, whose feature film directorial debut, “We Have Never Been Modern,” premiered at Karlovy Vary, is prepping his follow-up, “Sleep Well,” with French actress Nadia Tereszkiewicz — the breakout star of François Ozon’s “The Crime Is Mine” — cast in a leading role. “It’s a great combination of an actress I admire and someone who can help us shape the film for the international market,” says the director.
Another upcoming title from Chlupáček’s Prague-based production house Barletta, a reimagining of the classic Czech sci-fi film “Late August at the Hotel Ozone,” echoes a broader shift in the Czech industry, where among emerging filmmakers, “genre boundaries are looser, formats are more fluid and their visual storytelling often feels bolder [than in the past],” according to Sedláčková.
“I think a lot of filmmakers from my generation are leaning more toward genre films and also trying to find the combination of auteur and more mainstream films,” says Ondřej Hudeček, a Sundance jury prize winner in 2016 for his queer romance short “Peacock.”
Hudeček’s fiction feature debut, “Little Thief,” which is in post-production, is a genre-spanning movie that he describes as equal parts “crime-comedy and social satire.” It’s a reflection of the director’s own influences — “a blend of American genre cinema and European arthouse” — and of a broader recognition in the Czech Republic of the ways in which world cinema is evolving.
“It’s not only from the filmmakers,” Hudeček says. “It’s also from the institutions, because they know that any healthy film industry needs diversity in the films that they produce.”
Slovak-born filmmaker Tereza Nvotová, whose sophomore feature, “Nightsiren,” won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2022, says the industry has come a long way from her student days in Prague, when there was a perception that the Czech New Wave was “the only great thing that ever happened” in Czech cinema.
Nvotová, who teaches at Prague’s venerable Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts, or FAMU, says her students possess a confidence and “courage” that’s helping to elevate Czech cinema and “move the industry to a whole other level, in terms of being recognized by the world.”
Unlike the country’s last great cinematic movement, however, Nvotová says this time around, “it’s not going to be a wave at all.”
“I think we are very individual,” she says. “This new generation of filmmakers are trying to find their own voices, which are not necessarily being dictated by Western culture.”