Need a break from the awful­ness of world news? Choose cinema

It’s 1.30am in the Small Hall in the Hotel Ther­mal which acts as HQ for the Karlovy Vary Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val in the Czech Repub­lic. The Small Hall, as is the way of these things, is actu­al­ly pret­ty big. Still, it is so full that there are peo­ple sit­ting in the aisles, and wall space is at a pre­mi­um for the pre­cious lum­bar sup­port it offers. Onscreen a Japan­ese man comes face-to-face with a gris­ly-look­ing zom­bie and a guy with dread­locks near me lets out a dorky laugh. Every­one else laughs too, part­ly at the zom­bie whose head has now explod­ed, part­ly at Dread­locks’ laugh.

Arguably the scene isn’t much dif­fer­ent from Mid­night Mad­ness screen­ings every­where – a pre­dom­i­nant­ly young, some­what buzzed crowd show­ing up for sicko genre kicks after all the more dis­cern­ing (read: stuffy) olds have head­ed for home for a nice Hor­licks. But the dif­fer­ence in Karlovy Vary is that the age pro­file of the crowd, the full­ness of the cin­e­ma, and the gen­er­al vibe of good-humoured, par­tic­i­pa­to­ry excite­ment, is not con­fined to these Mid­night screen­ings. All the pub­lic screen­ings, even of obscure sto­ries of alien­ation in rur­al Esto­nia from first-time direc­tors, are full, and the vast major­i­ty of the atten­dees seem to be in their twen­ties. Iron­i­cal­ly, one of the old­est fes­ti­vals in the world has one of the youngest profiles.

It’s quite a point of pride: at a shindig I coerce Artis­tic Direc­tor Karel Och, via the pur­chase of a drink, into telling me the one thing he feels is dif­fer­ent about this year’s fes­ti­val from any oth­ers. He thinks about it a while, and tells me that this is the first year (he’s been run­ning the show since 2011) that he has exact­ly the team he wants in place. Elab­o­rat­ing, he adds, ​“And they are young. Me, I’m 42 and aside from the Fes­ti­val Direc­tor, I’m by far the old­est per­son involved.” The youth­ful­ness of the fes­ti­val comes from the top down.

But it’s also bot­tom-up. That is ensured by the prac­tise of allow­ing all com­ers – most­ly stu­dents who pack out the near­by fes­ti­val camp­site – to freely occu­py any seat left avail­able about five min­utes pri­or to the the film begin­ning. It’s what guar­an­tees almost every screen­ing is full to capac­i­ty – that every film in the broad and deep slate unfurls before the max­i­mum num­ber of eye­balls, and influ­ences the max­i­mum num­ber of minds.

The impor­tance of this struck me this year with greater force than on any of my pre­vi­ous four vis­its. The last few weeks were among the worst in the worst year for world­wide news and cur­rent affairs. For a while, for those of us on the side­lines, it felt like watch­ing some bizarre game of transat­lantic awful­ness ping-pong, won­der­ing if the UK or the US would be the source of the hideous head­line we’d wake up to tomor­row. The feel­ing of fid­dling while Rome burned became so intense as to be almost debil­i­tat­ing: when the world is going to hell, what busi­ness does any semi-ratio­nal per­son have hang­ing out in a sun­ny spa town and watch­ing movies – even chal­leng­ing debuts about alien­ation in rur­al Estonia?

The answer of course is that there’s no excuse, and also no real alter­na­tive except to keep on try­ing to liv­ing the life you want to live while also doing your best to be the change you want to see in the world. And one of the changes that I, as a film lover with an almost lim­it­less faith in the abil­i­ty of the medi­um to edi­fy, unite and enter­tain, want to see in the world is pret­ty well exem­pli­fied by Karlovy Vary’s eclec­tic, broad­mind­ed, inclu­sive and youth­ful profile.

The dread­locked guy with the sil­ly laugh looks up at the screen and times the open­ing of a smug­gled can of beer to a shot­gun blast, and I get the most absurd feel­ing that things might not be so bleak after all. Where there’s mil­len­ni­als at movies, there’s hope.