The publication was created through a collaboration between AFO’s current creative team and Palacký University Press. Symbolically, it was completed and launched during the opening ceremony of this year’s festival at the Metropol Cinema.

The book covers three inseparable layers of the festival – the present, the past, and its broader social impact. It offers a reader-friendly history of AFO from its beginnings to today, an extensive photo album packed with archival images from across all editions, interviews with former AFO directors and team members who helped shape the modern festival, essay-style contributions dedicated to the genre of popular-science film, and as a bonus, a double-sided poster, a designer postcard, and an anniversary badge.

Jiří Slavík, the author of the book’s historical section, sees AFO60 as a long-overdue tribute. “With this book, we managed to fill or ‘rediscover’ many of the blind spots in the festival’s history, since the last attempt to map it out through interviews and statistics dates back to 1995 – when AFO had held ‘only’ thirty editions,” he explains. He also hopes that by recalling earlier times, the book might inspire festival veterans to contribute even more fragments to AFO’s history in the future.

“For AFO’s 60th anniversary, we wanted to create something unconventional – for the festival’s fans, for lovers of book design, and for ourselves. Something that honors AFO as a whole. Something you would be proud to gift to yourself or others. The book highlights all the aspects we see as essential over six decades of the festival’s history, aiming to commemorate, spotlight, or place them in a broader context. It works as an instant source of knowledge and entertainment, an artistic experience, and a repository of information for the future. Just like AFO itself,” says Eva Navrátilová, the current AFO director.

In recent years, AFO has become known for the bold visual identity of each festival edition, so it comes as no surprise that the book’s unconventional format reflects this spirit too. Its concept was created by the festival’s art director, Radim Měsíc. “A big part of the work on the book involved searching through the university archives. The entire existence of the festival depends on the careful, meticulous work of dozens of people compiling and piecing together countless documents, facts, materials, and other fragments. Symbolically, we decided to use a binder format for the book, which is closely connected to all of this. The different parts of the book are arranged pyramid-style according to size and clipped into the binder as standalone chapters. Each section can stand alone, but together they form a complete whole,” adds Eva Navrátilová.

The publication Academia Film Olomouc: 60 Years of Popular-Science Film was published with the support of the Czech Film Fund, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, IOCB Tech, and the Statutory City of Olomouc.