The hills around Karlovy Vary have been alive with music for the past 10 days, from Australian movie heavyweights with weekend rock-star aspirations to Ukrainian gypsy punks, locally brewed oompah-folk bands, and the relentless ear-thumping Eurodisco DJ sets that keep this chocolate-box Czech spa resort raving deep into the small hours.
After last year’s solid return from Covid limbo, central Europe’s premiere film festival felt more breathlessly busy than ever, with packed houses for even obscure art-house screenings, plus an ever-expanding party zone of bars, food stalls and outdoor dance clubs fanning out across the parks and plazas that surround Hotel Thermal, the man-made mountain of gloriously ugly-sexy concrete brutalism which serves as the main festival hub.
The 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival opened with a blast of international glamour as Alicia Vikander and Russell Crowe swept into town to receive honorary Crystal Globe awards for their screen careers so far. KVIFF prides itself on its self-effacing humour and lack of pomposity, in stark contrast to bigger and more glitzy Euro-festivals. That said, Crowe perhaps pushed the joke too far in his speech by confessing he was unaware the festival even existed until recently, adding that his main motive for attending was to play with his hobby band, Indoor Garden Party. Later, when they did play, the joke was on all of us.
Serious-minded social dramas dominated the main competition prizes. The big winner, taking home the top Crystal Globe statue (plus a handsome $25,000 paycheck) was Stephan Komandarev’s tragicomic Bulgarian thriller Blaga’s Lessons, about a struggling pensioner who fights back against criminal scammers and a rotten, rigged financial system. Eli Skorcheva also won the festival’s Best Actress award for her flinty performance as the film’s eponymous 70-year-old bad-ass heroine.
Meanwhile, the Special Jury Prize (worth $15,000) went to German-Iranian director Behrooz Karamizade’s elegantly crafted Empty Nets, about the romantic and financial friction between a socially mismatched couple, with a subtext of sly political critique against the current regime in Tehran. Another Iranian based in Europe, Babak Jalali, also picked up the Best Director prize for his lyrical immigrant drama Fremont, building on a very rich Iranian presence at Karlovy Vary this year, from Jafar Panahi’s latest meta-movie No Bears to more experimental low-budget fare.
In the festival’s secondary Proxima competition, the two main prizes went to Yoo Ji-young’s sombre, quietly angry abortion drama Birth and the bittersweet childhood fable Guras by Indian director Surav Rai. Both earned their awards, but some KV regulars question the festival’s rebranding of its former East of the West section, which previously showcased cinema from former Eastern Bloc nations, as the more internationally focused Proxima. Critics argue Karlovy Vary risks losing its distinctive voice by thinking globally rather than regionally.
All the same, there were still plenty of strong films from Eastern Europe in this year’s KVIFF program, most of them made by female directors. Two powerful Film Verdict favourites were Polish director Olga Chajdas’ emotionally raw punk-singer bio-drama Imago (which also won a main FIPRESCI jury prize) and Georgian director Tinatin Kajrishvili’s exquisitely beautiful, darkly satirical monochrome parable Citizen Saint. Look out for both at a festival near you soon.
Just like last year, the war in Ukraine hung over Karlovy Vary again like a dark cloud, both on screen and off. Once a major Russian tourist magnet and reliably sympathetic showcase for Russian cinema, particularly during Soviet times, the Czech spa town now takes a bold zero-tolerance stance against Putin’s gangster regime. As festival director Karel Och explained, “we would not accept any Russian films supported by the state after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
Speaking to The Film Verdict, Czech-based Russian actor Ivan Shvedoff endorsed this strict boycott of his former homeland. “It is not the time for Russian film and its representatives to participate in international cultural forums,” he said. “You can’t put people being bombed and people bombing their country in the same room and give them equal time to express their position.”
Indeed, the Ukraine conflict figured in several stand-out films in KVIFF, including the European premiere of Scream of My Blood: A Gogol Bordello Story. This lively documentary biopic about Kyiv-born rocker Eugene Hütz and his “gypsy punk” band includes footage of the swashbuckling singer playing for soldiers and refugees in his war-torn homeland. Hütz flew into Karlovy Vary to promote the film with a brief, impromptu live set in Karlovy Vary’s cavernous Grand Hall. The Ukraine invasion, he confidently told reporters, is only going to end one way, with total Russian defeat: “anyone who ever thought Russia would somehow accomplish the delusion of grandeur they set out for has clearly never met one single Ukrainian.” This was a ragged but life-affirming performance, one of many highlights of a noisy, crowded, bleary-eyed festival that mostly hit all the right notes.
