Finále Plzeň Festival
Finále Plzeň Festival is a film festival focused on Czech films, a six-day-long national festival of films, documentaries, TV & student works, a 144-hour-long event hosting hundreds of Czech and foreign film actors and professionals, a 8,640-minute-long event full of accompanying activities - debates, author's readings, exhibitions and children's programmes and the largest Czech film platform of its kind spread over 518,400 seconds!
Celebration of Czech film
The Festival organized in September offers a curatorial selection of current Czech cinematography that the audience should not miss. Many movies run through the cinemas faster than the viewer can even notice, some will not even make it to the cinemas at all. However, the audience can get to know them at the Finale, in addition to the participation of numerous delegations of creators. The programme includes about a hundred domestic films, from previews, premieres and films with minor Czech co-production to overviews of important and resonating films of our neighbourns or other selected European regions. Winning films are selected by a foreign expert juries, which also provides a different perspective in a purely Czech environment and on Czech cinematography.
Quality and tradition for the fourth decade
The first season of the Festival, which was initially named Films of Our Years (FINALE), took place in 1968 and presented the best of what Czechoslovak filmmakers made in the dense atmosphere of the gradual easing of the political situation in the 1960s. The then winner was Evald Schorm's film Courage For Every Day, which won the Festival’s Golden Kingfisher Award. The Kingfisher, also known as a flying gem, has since become the Festival’s symbol of hope and belief in political change. Over the years, the Golden Kingfisher has been awarded to films such as Jan Svěrák's The Elementary School (1991), Petr Zelenka's Buttoners (1998), Karin Babinská's Dolls (2007), Me, Olga Hepnarová directed by Tomáš Weinreb and Petr Kazda (2017), Adam Sedlák’s feature film Domestik (2019), a film on the border between comedy and drama - Somewhere Over the Chemtrails - directed by Adam Koloman Rybanský (2022) or Albert Hospodářský's debut Brutální vedro (2023).
For almost four decades, the Festival has become a major player on the Czech cultural scene and has secured a permanent place there. The initial overview of Czech cinematography gradually became an internationally recognized platform promoting Czech audio-visual production and Czech filmmakers both at home and abroad.