– The selection of domestic projects is shaped by urgent personal dilemmas and genre-inflected storytelling, and spans queer thriller, auteur animation and K-pop series
The teams taking part in this year’s KVIFF Talents
The 2026 edition of KVIFF Talents, an initiative under the patronage of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, will showcase six new audiovisual projects during this year’s Industry Days (5-8 July). Selected from among more than 100 submissions, the projects span feature-length fiction, historical drama, animation and episodic formats, with a strong emphasis on female-driven stories, genre hybridity and formally distinctive new voices. As in previous editions, the initiative is divided into the Feature Pool, dedicated to feature-length films and offering CZK 120,000 (approximately €5,000) per selected project, and the Creative Pool for other audiovisual formats, where each selected project receives CZK 50,000 (€2,000) alongside expert consultations and presentation support.
One of the most closely watched Feature Pool titles is Exposed, the feature-length fiction debut by Czech director Klára Tasovská, whose documentary I’m Not Everything I Want to Be was selected as the Czech submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. Set over 24 hours in 1980s Prague, the mysterious thriller follows Laura, a self-destructive young photographer whose anti-establishment rebellion brings her into conflict with a male-dominated artistic world, a semi-legal queer milieu and her own unstable sense of truth. Nera, the feature-length fiction debut by director Ivana Vogrinc Vidali, follows Tereza, a recent secondary-school graduate gradually losing her sight, whose bond with her guide dog becomes both refuge from and confrontation with a system built on obedience. Vogrinc Vidali brings her psychologically attentive short-film background to a contained drama about care, disability, dependence and control. Until We Leave, the debut project by screenwriter Lucia Čižinská, produced by Tereza Wiński (One Way Ticket Films), follows four women in their thirties travelling to France to visit a terminally ill friend. Combining intimate drama, tragicomedy and observational road movie, it focuses on friendship, mortality and early middle age.
In the Creative Pool, Burning Witches – written by Martina Babišová and Věra Starečková, and produced by this year’s Czech Producer on the Move, Dagmar Sedláčková, of Masterfilm (see the interview) – brings historical episodic storytelling to the selection. Set in the 17th-century Bohemian-Polish borderlands, it follows noblewoman Katuše as she tries to save her sister from execution while challenging the structures of female persecution and social control. The Inhalatorium, the feature-length animated debut by director and animator Bára Anna Stejskalová, produced by Jakub Rálek for DIVIZE animace, follows a 13-year-old girl sent to a mountain sanatorium for asthma treatment, where a friend’s disappearance leads her into a closed world of secrets. Building on Stejskalová’s internationally recognised stop-motion work, The Inhalatorium is a fog-shrouded coming-of-age mystery rooted in mountain folklore, with auteur animation and co-production potential. The final project, K-Dream, is a fictional limited series by Adam Sedlák (Domestique), produced by Linda Krejčí and Monika Soukup for Milk & Honey Film. Centred on a European K-pop obsessive who returns from Korea to launch an idol academy in Berlin, the series extends Sedlák’s interest in ambition, performance and competitive subcultures, already explored in Banger. and in the drug-themed limited series Adikts, into a transnational pop-culture setting where European individualism collides with Asian discipline.
The selected projects for KVIFF Talents 2026 are as follows:
Feature Pool
Until We Leave – Lucia Čižinská (Czech Republic)
Producer: Tereza Wiński (One Way Ticket Films)
Exposed – Klára Tasovská (Czech Republic)
Producer: Lukáš Kokeš
Nera – Ivana Vogrinc Vidali (Czech Republic)
Producer: TBC
Creative Pool
Burning Witches – Martina Babišová, Věra Starečková (Czech Republic)
Producer: Dagmar Sedláčková (Masterfilm)
K-Dream – Adam Sedlák (Czech Republic)
Producers: Linda Krejčí, Monika Soukup (Milk & Honey Film)
The Inhalatorium – Bára Anna Stejskalová (Czech Republic)
Producer: Jakub Rálek (DIVIZE animace)
