The\u00a0Karlovy Vary\u00a0International\u00a0Film Festival<\/a>\u00a0took its traditional black-tie opening night celebrations to the max on Friday to celebrate the double anniversary of its 60th edition<\/a>\u00a0in the 80th year of the Czech fest with a room full of stars, music and dance.<\/p>\n Dustin Hoffman<\/a> (The Graduate, Kramer vs. Kramer,\u00a0Rain Man) was honored with KVIFF<\/a>\u2018s Crystal Globe for outstanding artistic contributions to world cinema, while Maggie Gyllenhaal<\/a>\u00a0(The Bride!, The Lost Daughter,\u00a0Secretary,\u00a0The Honourable Woman) received the festival\u2019s President\u2019s Award<\/a>. And both charmed the adoring crowd with their speeches.<\/p>\n More from The Hollywood Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n Jesse Eisenberg<\/a> (The Social Network,\u00a0A Real Pain,\u00a0When You Finish Saving the World) and Harvey Keitel (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Reservoir Dogs) were also among the big names in the room after walking the expanded red carpet<\/a> of the festival in the Czech spa town.<\/p>\n Kry\u0161tof Mucha<\/a>, the executive director of the world\u2019s second-oldest film fest, and KVIFF artistic director Karel Och<\/a> were, of course, on hand to hand over the honors during the big kickoff celebration, emceed by Czech TV host Marek Eben<\/a>.<\/p>\n Hoffman took to the stage as he was showered in a thunderous standing ovation by the capacity crowd in the legendary Grand Hall of the brutalist Hotel Thermal. \u201cI am honored and humbled by this award,\u201d the soon-to-be-89-year-old started off saying. \u201cDecades ago, when I worked with Robert Redford when he was a young child of 65, Redford said to me: \u2018You never think about a body of work while you\u2019re making movies, because you\u2019re busy building the body.\u2019 And that\u2019s true. The pleasure of doing what we do is being engrossed in the work itself and losing track of time.\u201d<\/p>\n Continued Hoffman: \u201cI first fell in love with acting because it was the first time I felt lost in time. I knew instinctively that this was how I wanted to live. I wanted to be lost in time. I wanted to be absorbed in time. Why? Because it made me feel alive.\u201d<\/p>\n The star also shared his emotions watching a sizzle reel of his work before coming to the stage. \u201cWhen you are turning 89 and there it is, your life\u2019s work on the screen, staring back at you, it makes me very emotional and very nostalgic, and most of all, very, very grateful to have had the opportunity to do what I love decade after decade with so many brilliant people who were doing what they loved too,\u201d Hoffman concluded. \u201cI want to thank the Karlovy Vary Film Festival for serving this love of filmmaking. Festivals like this one help to support and inspire all the young actors and filmmakers who pursue this work with passion and love, and that\u2019s what makes it truly meaningful. So, thank you for the honor of this award, but more importantly, thank you for joining with me in caring about this art form.\u201d<\/p>\n Before Hoffman, Gyllenhaal also received a huge and warm Czech welcome, a year after her husband Peter Sarsgaard, who was with her, got political<\/a> on the KVIFF opening-night stage where he had been honored with the same award. The fest\u2019s bestowing the President\u2019s Award on her also came 20 years after<\/a> Gyllenhaal won a competitive award at KVIFF as best actress for her role in Laurie Collyer\u2019s drama\u00a0Sherrybaby, in which she played a young woman who gets released from prison and is recovering from a\u00a0heroin addiction. Sherrybaby also won Karlovy Vary\u2019s Crystal Globe award back in 2006. Back then, the actress couldn\u2019t come to town. But she recalled one time she visited Karlovy Vary before.<\/p>\n Maggie Gyllenhaal<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been so moved by this whole night, by the beautiful dancing and the singing. If you have seen my latest film, you\u2019ll know that I love dancing and singing, and I was teared up a little bit watching everyone be so open, and it moved me. This is actually the second time I\u2019ve been to Karlovy Vary, even though I wasn\u2019t able to pick up that beautiful award for Sherrybaby. I was here when I was 19.\u201d<\/p>\n One could hear surprise in the audience as she shared how she did a semester abroad in Prague when she was at Columbia University, during which she visited the spa town. \u201cWe ate the wafers, which I love, tasted the [thermal] water, and that was actually one of the only activities I participated in when I was on the study abroad,\u201d Gyllenhaal quipped. \u201cI\u2019m actually a really good student, but when I was studying in Prague, I didn\u2019t go to really any classes at all.\u201d<\/p>\n She then charmed the audience with some Czech words and phrases. \u201cI think that being here that semester was one of the first inklings I had of myself as a director, because, as you saw from that, I made a whole lot of movies as an actress, and so far only two as a director,\u201d she concluded. \u201cIt took me a while to realize that that was a better job for me.\u201d<\/p>\n She also recalled loving Milos Forman\u2019s movie Loves of a Blonde. \u201cI loved that movie, and it\u2019s like something cracked in me. I went, I like that. OK, maybe everyone else likes The Firemen\u2019s Ball better. I like this better. This is my taste, and I kind of started to go, OK, yeah, I like Quentin Tarantino, like everybody else does, and I also like Jane Campion, and I also like Fiddler on the Roof, and it turns out I also like obscure Milos Forman movies, or one of them in particular.\u201d Concluded Gyllenhaal: \u201cThat voice of going, \u2018OK, this is me! This is what I like!\u2019 is part of what pushed me to be a director to express my view of the world, however strange and challenging, and however different.\u201d<\/p>\n The opening ceremony kicked off, as has become tradition<\/a>, with the unveiling of the new KVIFF trailer<\/a>, this year starring Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd<\/a>, and a big spectacle of a stage show that gave a cinematic and musical tour through the festival\u2019s history, including the Titanic theme sang in Czech and such tunes as MC Hammer\u2019s U Can\u2019t Touch This.<\/p>\n Eben quipped that the foreign audience members should know that all on-stage singers are big Czech stars. \u201cBut if they lived in the U.S. \u2026 they likely wouldn\u2019t be such big stars.\u201d Eben also jokingly thanked the Czech national soccer team for getting out of the soccer World Cup early \u201cout of loyalty to the festival.\u201d<\/p>\n The special honors for Hoffman and Gyllenhaal were followed by the opening film of KVIFF 2026. Kicking off the anniversary during the soccer World Cup was, fittingly, the 1986 World Cup documentary The Match<\/a>, directed by Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco, which chronicles the infamous match between Argentina and England, which became mostly remembered for Diego Maradona\u2019s \u201cHand of God\u201d goal.<\/p>\n After the film, the opening night festival crowd and the whole town will be treated to a\u00a0special musical show created by Czech DJ and producer\u00a0NobodyListen, which will bring together personalities from the contemporary Czech music scene spanning a range of genres and generations \u2013 including several musicians from Karlovy Vary itself.<\/p>\n The opening film and music show will not be followed by the traditional Karlovy Vary midnight fireworks, but by what organizers have called the largest drone show<\/a> ever to be staged in the Czech Republic or Slovakia. The 10-minute aerial display, entitled \u201cStars and Winners of Your Own Story,\u201d\u00a0will see a fleet of 1,300 synchronized drones transforming the night sky.<\/p>\n Best of The Hollywood Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for THR’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The\u00a0Karlovy Vary\u00a0International\u00a0Film Festival\u00a0took its traditional black-tie opening night celebrations to the max on Friday to celebrate the double anniversary of its 60th edition\u00a0in the 80th year of the Czech fest with a room full of stars, music and dance. Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate, Kramer vs. Kramer,\u00a0Rain Man) was honored with KVIFF\u2018s Crystal Globe for outstanding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2487001,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[347644,488894,486354,392287,486355,378991,489714,489715,333528,380669],"class_list":["post-2487000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-dustin-hoffman","tag-karlovy-vary","tag-karlovy-vary-international-film-festival","tag-kramer-vs-kramer","tag-kviff","tag-maggie-gyllenhaal","tag-marek-eben","tag-night-celebrations","tag-robert-redford","tag-the-social-network"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Dustin-Hoffman-Maggie-Gyllenhaal-Charm-Karlovy-Vary-to-Kick-Off.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2487000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2487002,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487000\/revisions\/2487002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2487001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2487000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2487000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2487000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/span><\/div>\n