Karlovy Vary 2024
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Producer Christine Vachon, one of the most vital figures in American independent cinema, is one of five members of the Crystal Globe Competition Jury at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. On the day that the lineup was announced, writer Cole Haddon asked Vachon what—if anything—still excites her about walking into a movie cold. “I think there’s kind of an adventure to it,” she says. “I don’t know any of those movies. There’s no way I would’ve seen any of them. I just know that I’m going to be there for about ten days and have about sixteen little adventures.”
Georg Szalai, who recently spoke with Karlovy Vary artistic director Karel Och for the Hollywood Reporter, lists eight “offbeat” films to catch during the fifty-eighth edition, which opens on Friday and runs through July 6. Three of them are in the running for the Crystal Globe: Beata Parkanová’s Tiny Lights, a child’s view of her family’s breakup; Mark Cousins’s A Sudden Glimpse of Deeper Things, a portrait of Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham narrated by Tilda Swinton; and Adam Martinec’s Our Lovely Pig Slaughter, a debut feature that “evokes the masterworks of the Czechoslovak New Wave.”
Other competition titles include Bruno Anković’s Celebration, the story of a young Croatian villager lured by the political right in the run-up to and during the Second World War; Peter Hoogendoorn’s Three Days of Fish, a study of the troubled relationship between a sixty-five-year-old man and his forty-five-year-old son; and Noaz Deshe’s Xoftex, in which Syrian and Palestinian asylum seekers pass the time at a Greek refugee camp by shooting a zombie movie. In Singaporean director Nelicia Low’s first feature, Pierce, a young man suspects that his older brother may be a violent sociopath.
The Proxima competition, now in its third year, is the festival’s rough equivalent to Un Certain Regard in Cannes or Orizzonti in Venice. Szalai’s list of offbeat recommendations includes Victoria Verseau’s intimate documentary diary Trans Memoria; Paula Ďurinová’s Lapilli, an essay on loss; Zhengfan Yang’s Stranger, a collection of vignettes set in hotel rooms; Omer Tobi’s Tropicana, in which a murder sparks a journey for a middle-aged woman with advanced muscular dystrophy; and The Alienated, a thriller from Anja Kreis that may or may not hinge on the birth of the Antichrist. Pavel G. Vesnakov says that he aims to “explore the stillness of memory and the muteness of a hidden childhood trauma” in Windless.
“Efficiently run and pleasantly nonhierarchical, KVIFF offers a chance to see the buzzy releases under less pressure than one might feel in Cannes or Venice,” wrote Farran Smith Nehme a few days ago. Many attendees choose to bypass the expense and hassle of A-list festivals and then catch some of the year’s most talked-about titles in the unhurried atmosphere of the centuries-old spa town. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, the winner of the Grand Prix in Cannes; Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples, a hit at Sundance and Berlin; and Bill and Turner Ross’s Gasoline Rainbow, which premiered in Venice last fall, are among the titles screening in KVIFF 2024’s Horizons program.
A new restoration of François Truffaut’s Two English Girls (1971) will see its world premiere in the Out of the Past program, which will also offer screenings of films by John Ford, Wim Wenders, Bruno Dumont, and John Cassavetes. Steven Soderbergh will introduce two of his films, Kafka (1991) and its new version, Mr. Kneff, as part of this year’s retrospective, The Wish to Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinema. Other stars and filmmakers on hand for tributes and screenings include Daniel Brühl (Next Door), Nicole Holofcener (You Hurt My Feelings), Francine Maisler (The Bikeriders), Viggo Mortensen (The Dead Don’t Hurt), Clive Owen (Closer), and one of the Czech Republic’s most popular performers, Ivan Trojan (The Karamazovs).
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