He was the man who announced Václav Havel president to the world cameras. A man with the craggy charm of an old-world movie star and the devil-may-care twinkle of an artist who’d seen history blink—and winked back. Jiří Bartoška, the Czech actor turned cultural impresario, didn’t just light up cigarettes for sixty years; he lit up rooms, screens, and eventually, the sleepy spa town of Karlovy Vary. With his death at 78, we don’t merely lose an actor—we lose the beating heart of Czech cinema’s most vibrant and improbable revival story.
Let’s start with the facts. Born in 1947 in Děčín, a town that no foreigner can pronounce properly but all good Czechs know, Bartoška came into his profession sideways—an accidental actor who found himself on stage almost out of a dare. He studied at JAMU in Brno, that cousin of Prague’s cultural elite, and came up in the theater alongside legends: Polívka, Balzerová, Skopal. But unlike many of his contemporaries, who dissolved into either nostalgia or disillusionment, Bartoška evolved. He was one of those rare actors who aged into his charisma—he grew into the bones of his face and the weight of his voice.
On screen, Bartoška was never “just” anything. Not just a leading man, not just a supporting actor, and never, ever a background fixture. Whether he was playing a bandit, a priest, or a philosophizing tiger in midlife crisis (only in Czech cinema could that be a serious role), he possessed that ineffable quality Pauline Kael loved most: he meant it. He was always present. He had the kind of magnetism that didn’t scream; it murmured—and you leaned in to listen.
And yet, Bartoška’s finest performance may have taken place offscreen. When he assumed the presidency of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 1994, the festival was on life support. Post-communist Czech lands had little appetite—or funding—for a glamorous vestige of socialist-era cinema. But Bartoška, along with his formidable comrade-in-culture Eva Zaoralová, understood that culture, like a good performance, needs stakes. They didn’t just save the festival. They resurrected it.
Karlovy Vary under Bartoška’s reign was less a festival than a fever dream. It wasn’t Cannes, and thank God for that. There was no red carpet elitism. You could drink Becherovka with a Hollywood starlet at 2 a.m. and stumble into a Turkish drama at 10 the next morning. Robert Redford came. So did Michael Douglas and Jude Law. Keanu Reeves, Johnny Depp. But the real glamour wasn’t imported—it was built, brick by Czech brick, by Bartoška’s insistence that film culture still mattered, even (or especially) in a world drunk on distraction.
He was both velvet and steel. He could schmooze and intimidate in the same sentence. He never gave up smoking, not really; he just traded in the old-school cancer sticks for their vaporous descendants, like a man who knew the show must go on, but was willing to negotiate with his body. He showed up at the Czech Lions awards during his chemo sessions. He ran a film festival while carrying cancer like it was a press pass. He didn’t ask for pity, just a clean suit and a working lighter.
And so we ask: what now, Karlovy Vary?
It’s not just the loss of a figurehead. The death of Bartoška closes a chapter in which a small festival in a picturesque Czech town became a global meeting place of cinema and soul. He made it human. He made it matter. Without him, the festival may live on—institutions tend to—but it will feel like watching a film with the lights too bright and the sound too low. The warmth is gone.
Jiří Bartoška was unapologetically charismatic, allergic to pretension, and devoted to the idea that art should make you feel something, even if it made you uncomfortable. He believed in actors as artisans, not idols. And he believed in festivals not as status rituals, but as joyous, democratic celebrations of human storytelling.
He’s gone now. And somewhere—probably at a smoky celestial bar, arguing with Václav Havel or reworking Poledňáková’s script one last time—he’s laughing that crooked, gorgeous laugh of his. But for the rest of us, there’s a seat empty in the Grand Hall at Thermal. And no one can fill it.
