The ghost of Kafka was a powerful presence at the 58th edition of Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, haunting the fairy-tale Czech spa resort’s cobbled back streets, gorgeous old theatres and grand chocolate-box hotels. Alongside a rich global mix in its regular competition and sidebar sections, the festival marked the centenary of the local literary legend’s death with a season of films based on, and inspired by, his work.
Among the starry international guest list was feted US director Steven Soderbegh, who introduced both versions of his Kafka-inspired “silent film with sound”, Kafka (1991) and its shorter, more surreal, anarchic new metamorphosis, Mister Kneff (2021). Soderbergh was on playful form, at one point implying a mysterious stranger had broken into his house, stolen the film and remixed it without his knowledge. Very Kafka-esque.
Family psychodramas were also a key motif in the KVIFF program, alongside period pieces about the horrors of fascism in 20th century Europe, which packed extra punch given the current resurgence of far-right parties across the continent. Battlefield films from the Ukraine frontline featured prominently too, notably Oleh Sentsov’s remarkable “accidental” documentary Real, while Russian films were once again banned for the third year running. This is a poignant reversal given that Karlovy Vary was once the major shop window for Soviet cinema, and was even twinned with Moscow Film Festival during its early decades, when it partly functioned as a cultural outpost of Kremlin soft power.
But even if it cannot escape the long shadow of history, from Kafka to the Cold War, Karlovy Vary is emphatically not stuck in the past. With a youthful team of programmers under artistic director Karel Och, plus a lively young crowd drawn here by budget-price festival passes, this year’s edition felt loud and busy. With 453 film screenings and almost 130,000 tickets sold over a nine-day period, plus a constant background throb of outdoor music events and late-night DJ sets, it was certainly never boring.
Besides Soderbergh, other high-profile guests included Daniel Brühl, Clive Owen and veteran Czech screen star Ivan Trojan. But the warmest reception was reserved for Petr Folprecht, a KVIFF legend who earns wild applause every year for shuffling onstage and laying down the microphone stand used for screening introductions in the Grand Hall of the Thermal Hotel, the festival’s main hub. After 30 years on duty, and one final symbolic stage appearance on the festival’s opening weekend, Folprecht retired from his long-standing role on a wave of deafening cheers. This was a perfect mic-drop moment, Czech style.
For the film critic contingent at KVIFF, this year’s biggest shock came when the jury headed by US indie producer Christine Vachon awarded the main prize, the Crystal Globe, to A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things by Northern Irish director Mark Cousins. The first British feature to win the top KV award since Ken Loach’s Kes (1970) more than half a century ago, this love letter to Scottish painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham is a typically quirky, discursive, absorbing essay-film from Cousins, with narration by Tilda Swinton. But the choice to give a $25,000 prize and profile boost to a fairly minor work from an established film-maker instead of a more marginal voice, rising talent or first-time director still left many baffled.
The other big winner in the festival’s main competition section and beyond was Lilja Ingolfsdottir ‘s divorce drama Loveable, an emotional assault course starring Helga Guren as a 40-year-old wife and mother plunged into soul-searching depression when her marriage collapses. Sharply scripted and acted, Ingolfsdottir’s debut feature plays like a painfully raw therapy session at times. It took home the Jury Prize and Best Actress Award. plus a wide sweep of non-statutory prizes from unofficial juries too. Rumour has it the film has now been shortlisted for Norway’s official Oscar submission.
Also in the main competition, Singaporean Nelicia Low was crowned Best Director for her stylish but soapy Taiwanese psycho-thriller Pierce about the intense bond between two brothers, both highly skilled at fencing, one of them a homicidal sociopath. And sharing the Best Actor award were Dutch duo Ton Kas and Guido Pollemans, who play a fractious father and son in Peter Hoogendoorn’s beautifully observed tragicomedy Three Days of Fish. Meanwhile, the top winners in Proxima, Karlovy Vary’s more left-field secondary competition, were US-based Chinese director Zhengfan Yang’s Stranger, a series of single-shot mini-dramas all filmed in hotel rooms, and Peruvian Paulo Tizón gripping documentary Night Has Come, an intimate portrait of young recruits to an elite paramilitary police unit.
Outside the film selection, but still a key part of Karlovy Vary’s distinctive aesthetic personality, is the festival’s classy visual branding. This was especially strong this year, from eye-catching posters to smart new bags and a growing Taylor Swift-style range of official merchandise on sale in pop-up shops. Refreshed every year, the latest KVIFF logo is one of the best yet, deploying a versatile square and circle motif to represent celluloid film canisters, camera lenses, the concrete brutalist geometry of the Hotel Thermal, and more. Classic Czech graphic design, mid-century modernism remixed for the digital age.
Another charming KVIFF tradition is the ever-growing collection of bespoke monochrome promotional shorts featuring former celebrity guests of the festival, who are typically seen disparaging or even destroying their honorary Crystal Globe statuettes. This year’s addition to the pantheon was Benicio del Toro, a Karlovy Vary guest in 2022, who was filmed glumly wandering around a train station complaining about the tedious obligation of attending festivals to pick up dumb awards. Steeped in wry Czech humour, this inspired anti-marketing device is unique to Karlovy Vary. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any bigger, self-important film festival being so disarmingly ironic about itself. One day, somebody needs to compile all these wry vignettes into an epic all-star blockbuster of deadpan, bleakly funny, Kafka-esque comedy.