Film Festivals in July

The Pula Film Festival is Croatia's oldest, running since 1954, and its main screen is the reason to come: films play inside the first-century Pula Arena, a Roman amphitheater that held some 23,000 spectators and ranks among the six largest surviving anywhere. The 2026 edition, the seventy-third, runs July 9-16 with more than 150 screenings across ten-plus venues and the Golden Arena national awards, sixty years after the competitive format began. Watching a premiere under a two-thousand-year-old limestone ellipse, with the harbor behind the screen, is one of European cinema's singular settings.

The Zanzibar International Film Festival is East Africa's flagship film event, running since 1997 from Ngome Kongwe, Stone Town's 17th-century Old Fort, where screenings play in an open-air amphitheater inside the fort walls. The program centers African and Indian Ocean cinema, the Dhow Countries, with music and arts spilling through the UNESCO-listed quarter for the week. Watching a premiere under the stars inside a coral-stone fort, with the call to prayer drifting over the walls between films, is the kind of festival experience no purpose-built venue can copy. It shares the Old Fort stage with February's Sauti za Busara, which makes Stone Town a two-festival town.

The Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival, founded in 2004, is the Caucasus's flagship film event: the 23rd edition runs July 12-19, 2026 with ninety films from forty countries, and the festival joined the FIAPF network this cycle. Its founding mission, crossroads of cultures and civilizations, plays out in a program that leans on the Armenian diaspora's global cinema alongside regional premieres, screened in a capital where July evenings move outdoors and the festival crowd fills the cafes around the Cascade. Apricot season and festival season are the same season, which is the kind of branding no committee could buy.

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is central Europe's leading film event and one of the oldest festivals in the world, running since 1946. Each July the Bohemian spa town of Karlovy Vary fills with premieres, competition titles and industry crowds, centerd on the modernist Hotel Thermal and the colonnades along the Tepla river. As a FIAPF-accredited competitive festival it programs world and international premieres alongside strong retrospectives, and it has kept a reputation for being unusually open and public, with young audiences camping and queueing for tickets rather than a red-carpet-only affair. The setting, a 19th-century spa resort of grand hotels, hot springs and forested hills, makes it as much a summer pilgrimage as a screening schedule. The 2026 edition is the 60th, marking 80 years since the first festival.