The 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival this year will include the presence of Steven Soderbergh, the Oscar-winning director and producer. The filmmaker will be in town to introduce two of his films, “Kafka” and “Mr. Kneff,” as part of the festival’s Kafka retrospective, The Wish to Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinema. Festival audiences will have the unique chance to see both films presented in person by Soderbergh.
The mysterious drama Kafka (1991), shot in Prague with Jeremy Irons in the title role, is a blending of Kafka’s real life with fiction. Thirty years later, Soderbergh re-edited Kafka to create an entirely new film, Mr. Kneff, set in Prague in 1919. The story is about a writer who uses his dead-end job as the inspiration for his writing. The new version of the film is twenty minutes shorter, with a rearranged narrative structure. Soderbergh colorized some scenes to differentiate between reality and the protagonist’s imagination. The film has a different soundtrack, including an instrumental version of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”
Soderbergh gained recognition with his directorial debut Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), which won a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and earned him a nomination for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay. Since then, Soderbergh’s prolific career has included a wide range of films, and he often takes on multiple roles such as writer, director, cinematographer, or editor. His 2000 film, Erin Brockovich (2000) earned Julia Roberts an Oscar in the title role, along with a Best Director nomination for Soderbergh. A year later, he took home an Academy Award for the crime drama Traffic (2001).
His eclectic filmography includes such diverse films as a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s famous sci-fi Solaris (2002), the two-part biopic of the revolutionary Che Guevara (Che, 2008), the psychological crime thriller Side Effects (2013), comedies Ocean’s Eleven (2002) and Magic Mike (2012), the biographical drama Behind the candelabra (2012), and the crime comedy Logan Lucky (2017). The psychological thriller Presence (2024) premiered at this year’s Sundance Festival. He has also successfully ventured into television production, among other things with the series The Knick, which was nominated for several Emmy awards.
KVIFF takes place 28 June – 7 July
