FAMU CELEBRATES 80 YEARS OF EXISTENCE WITH A YEAR-LONG SERIES OF SCREENINGS, DEBATES AND SPECIAL EVENTS

Prague – The Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) is celebrating 80 years since its inception in 2026. To mark this major milestone, one of the world’s first film schools has prepared a programme of film screenings, discussions, distribution activities and multimedia events that chart its history as well as its current output across fields and generations.

“Eighty years of FAMU remind us of our school’s illustrious past while attesting to its continuity, as FAMU has transformed along with the world around us throughout time. Spanning decades and various historical contexts, FAMU has succeeded in retaining its role as a place that offers students space for free creative thinking and searching for new artistic expressions. I am happy that it is also a place where both students and teachers can openly connect with the world today,” says Dean of FAMU David Čeněk.

A uniting thread of the celebrations, the Best of FAMU is a series of regular evenings to be held at Kino Ponrepo throughout the year, offering themed screenings showcasing the very best from the history of FAMU’s individual Departments. The series will launch on 28 January at 6 pm with the premiere of FAMU on FAMU – a series of reflections on the school from the perspectives of its students across different periods and societal contexts. The films selected for the series show that FAMU has always been more than just a school for its students – a vibrant space of everyday life, sharing, confrontations and humour whose essence remains the same throughout time. The featured films will include the legendary teamwork FAMU Žurnál: První občasník (1961) by Věra Chytilová, Jiří Menzel, Karel Němec and others and Zvukový film o FAMU (1969), a historical ‘patchwork’ offering a rare glimpse behind the scenes and into the lives of budding filmmakers. The evening will include a discussion with major FAMU alumni and alumnae. Director Václav Marhoul, cinematographer Ivan Šlapeta, documentary filmmaker Helena Třeštíková and other luminaries connected with the school have agreed to take part.

The subsequent events scheduled for the Ponrepo will feature the output of the Departments of Directing, Animated Film, Editing, Documentary Film, Audiovisual Studies, Producing, and FAMU International, with two of the evenings organised by DAMU and HAMU.

“Preparing the programme for the celebration, we emphasised dramaturgical diversity, combining sensitive probes into the past with the variety of the current output. Our primary goal is to commemorate FAMU in the settings where it feels most ‘at home’ in audiovisual terms: at festivals, in cinemas and on television screens. This is not intended to be a closed-ended series of recollections of its glorious past – it is meant to be an open door for all those who want to celebrate cinema and audiovisual art as the major factors that inform our perceptions of the world around us,” comments Vice-Dean for Public Relations and Development Vít Schmarc.

The celebration will also include special distribution activities that will present FAMU’s output to both domestic and international audiences. The Best of FAMU 80, an international and domestic distribution series, will premiere in October 2026 when the celebrations of the anniversary will climax. The project has been curated by Professor Jiří Voráč’s research team. Last but not least, the school is preparing special programming for selected domestic festivals.

The anniversary celebration programme will culminate with a FAMU multimedia event to be held at ARCHA+ on 9 October 2026. The all-night event will include an exhibition, concerts, film screenings and more audiovisual art forms.

A detailed programme will be published later this year.

Visual identity: Tamdem studio

Partners to the project: the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the National Film Archive, Ponrepo, Archa+, Czech Centre in Paris and the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Principal media partner: Czech TV. Media partners to the project: Czech Radio, Deník N, Total Film, Culturenet and Art2Friends.