In 2008, I was unexpectedly invited to attend the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival as a member of the press. I didn’t know much about the festival, or the town of Karlovy Vary, but I did know that the offer of a free trip to an old Czech Republic spa town for an exotic-sounding film festival was too good to pass up.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the town, or the festival, or the people. Karlovy Vary, also known as Carlsbad, was a pretty jumping hotspot for the European elite back in its 18th and 19th Century heyday; the likes of Beethoven, Goethe, Karl Marx and Chopin would come to chill and “take the waters” at its famous natural hot springs.
Most of the town retained its fairy-tale air even through the Communist era, with one massive, significant exception. Some time in the 1960s, when the film festival, founded in 1946, existed as an extension of the presumably pretty tendentious Moscow Film Festival (they alternated years), the government decided to build a new resort in the middle of the town. Construction was “waged” (according to the English-language plaque out front) in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, and the result was a sprawling incongruity: the Hotel Thermal, a singular example of what might be called late-Modernist Communist resort design, containing at least one disco (that I never found), several cinemas, smoky subterranean bars, whole floors of weird clinics visited by wealth Saudis and Russians, and, when the car dropped me off, hundreds of festival-goers.
I was disoriented and unsure where to go, but after waiting in line at various wickets (one disconcertingly called “Protocol”), I had my picture taken and was given my accommodations voucher. I immediately got the sense, later verified, that I was one of the only English speakers in town; though the festival was trying to extend its reach, it still felt very much like it was taking place behind the Iron Curtain.
I blearily took the elevator to the 14th floor, where I was immediately struck by the strange beauty of the Thermal’s elevator lobbies (I would become obsessed with them, later spend an afternoon photographing each floor, one by one). I dropped off my bags in my humid, too-bright room, with its two narrow, cot-like beds, drowsy and jetlagged.
It seemed too early to nap, so I decided to go back downstairs and get the lay of the land. I returned to the elevator lobby and hit the button; seconds later the elevator doors opened and a dog, alone, casually walked out and down the hall. I almost felt like it nodded at me. Surprised, perplexed, but too jet-lagged to make sense of what had just happened, I took the lift downstairs.
As soon as I exited it into the lobby, though, a panicky young man rushed up to me and grabbed me by the lapels. “Did you meet the dog?” he asked me, breathlessly.
“Uh… yes… I think so?” I answered.
“What floor?!”
“The 14th.”
“Oooohhh fuuuuuuuck,” he said, and rushed past me, and began furiously pressing the elevator call button over and over again.
