Nine Days in Karlovy Vary

On the evening of 3 July, in the Grand Hall of the Hotel Thermal, they played a showreel of Dustin Hoffman's career before handing him the Crystal Globe. Tootsie, Rain Man, Kramer vs Kramer. He stood there watching sixty years of his own work come at him in three minutes, and when he finally spoke he was visibly moved. He thanked the festival, then asked the room for something else: thank you for joining with me in caring about this art form.

That was the opening night of the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and Gi21 Capital was a main partner of it.

Why a technology investor is at a film festival

The short answer is that we said it ourselves when the partnership was announced: innovation requires inspiration. We spend most of the year on data centre infrastructure and software, and none of that produces the thing that happens in a dark room with 1,200 people watching the same frame at the same time.

The longer answer is less lofty. Film and venture capital are the same business wearing different clothes. A small group disappears for two or three years to make something nobody asked for, financed by people who cannot possibly know yet whether it will work. Most of it does not work. The ones that do tend to be the ones where somebody backed the people early, before it was obvious, and then stayed out of the way.

We do that with founders. Watching it done with directors is not a holiday from the job.

The part nobody photographs

Festivals look effortless from the outside and are logistics all the way down underneath. Karlovy Vary is a spa town in the hills, roughly two hours from the nearest major airport, and in the first week of July it has to absorb several thousand people who all need to be somewhere specific at a specific hour.

Alpha Aviation, a Czech operator in our portfolio that has been flying private and charter since 2011, handled air transport for guests coming in for the anniversary edition, Dustin Hoffman among them.

We mention it because it is the least glamorous thing we did and probably the most useful. Money is the easy part of a partnership. Being able to solve an actual problem for the organisers, in the week when the problem is expensive, is what a partner is for.

What we brought besides a logo

We did not want a branded wall. What we did instead was produce bilingual film guides, Czech and English, covering twenty films across four sections, so our guests could walk into the festival with a plan rather than queueing for whatever had seats left. Then we organised the week around those screenings and what people said afterwards.

Some of the better conversations we had all year happened in that gap between the credits and the street. Founders, investors and people from the film world, none of whom had any commercial reason to be talking to each other.

Eighty years, and counting

The festival was founded in 1946, which makes this its eightieth year and its sixtieth edition. It opened, in a World Cup summer, with a documentary about Maradona's Hand of God, which tells you something about how seriously it takes itself and how little it needs to.

Institutions like this are why ambitious work gets made in this part of Europe rather than only being watched here. That is worth supporting, and we intend to keep doing it.

Thanks to the festival team for a superbly run edition, and to everyone who came to Karlovy Vary with us.