Exploring Film and Life in Prague
Gerry Hwang is a senior double majoring in Cinema & Media Studies (CAS) and Advertising (COM). He spent the summer interning in Prague, creating social media content and exploring Europe. Below he describes his experience finding and participating in a local film festival that rounded out his experience abroad.
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This blazing hot summer of 2024 turned out to be an immensely rewarding self-reflective cinematic journey both literally and metaphorically. I was in Prague over the past couple of months for my Study Abroad Program in the Czech Republic – primarily for my Advertising Internship as a social media intern for a ski tourism company, editing videos for their social media platform.
Of course, I learned a lot from my advertising internship – and I knew it would be a beneficial experience for my long-term career to work in the entertainment/film industry. And exploring different parts of Prague and neighboring countries with my program friends during my free time/weekends was also amazing, but I knew something was missing during my time in Prague…
Then an epiphany happened during my usual trip back from my internship to my study abroad dorm, as I stumbled upon an advertisement poster of Karlovy Vary’s (city in the north of Czechia) 58th International Film Festival taking place in late June. And as soon as I saw the advertisement, (I’m not even joking) my heart began pounding with nervous exhilaration. I knew at that moment that I HAD to be at this film festival, or else I would be violating my good cinephile conscience. And since my internship was a hybrid of in-person and online work, I asked my supervisor and got permission to work from home for a week – which meant that I could be working my internship in between screenings at the festival.
So, I went to Karlovy Vary for a week and watched 20 films during my time at the festival (especially encouraged with my festival pass, which included 3 films per day along with any last-minute extra tickets for other screenings). Some of my memorable moments include the screening and Q&A of Steven Soderbergh’s thriller film Kafka (1991) in the festival’s series of examining Czech writer Franz Kafka’s works on screen, the restoration screening of one of Czech New Wave classics Murdering the Devil (1970) with the introduction by the lead actress Jiřina Bohdalová before the screening, and the midnight screening of Rose Glass’s latest neo-noir film Love Lies Bleeding (2024) with a surprise bodybuilder contest taking place before the screening (since the movie also involves a bodybuilder in a complex murder/romance neo-noir narrative).
But what I loved the most about my time during the festival was how lively and energetic each if not all screenings were during the film festival. I loved the visceral and raw audience reaction to the presented images on the big screen, and I felt… validated and alive to be in that particular environment.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, that there is this inseparable aspect with cinema and my life (as cliché as that sounds). There’s this lifelong quest/question toward truly understanding what cinema is (thanks André Bazin), and I still yet have to find a definitive answer for this search. But I guess I can also safely say that my time in Prague and this serendipitously venturing to the Karlovy Vary Film Festival has made me realize some of my more obvious priorities and personal goals in my life – which I guess, as you could have guessed, involves cinema.
+ In case you happen to be curious about my daily/weekly movie logs, here’s my Letterboxd: @BenandGerry
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