Looking Back to the Future: the 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Whether local or visiting festival-goers, distinguished or emerging filmmakers, industry professionals or members of the press, few attendees would have been unaware that 2024’s edition of KVIFF marked 30 years since Jiří Bartoška assumed the role of festival President.

Bartoška’s 30 years in the gig was the cover story of the Czech current affairs weekly, Reflex, widely read across the Czech lands and included in the swag bag doled out to accredited festival guests upon arrival. Similarly, the first of the two issues of festival published by KVIFF’s main media partner, the Czech daily paper Právo, also made “Barťák”’s 30 years its cover story gracing newsstands, festival venues and hotels all across town. It was the lead story in its four-page English-language insert as well. 

Moreover, the festival’s Opening and Closing Ceremonies in the Hotel Thermal Grand Hall included a theatrical spectacular greatest-hits mash-up paying tribute to those same 30 years, effectively providing a celebration too of the nearly-as-many years the Caban Brothers have staged these elaborate, straight-eye-eroticised productions. The ceremonies also featured a montage of images of Bartoška from across the years in the company of umpteen notable guests that put me in mind of a similar presentation five years ago that celebrated the 25 years that Bartoška and the much missed, since deceased Eva Zaoralová had led KVIFF as a double-act. (The latter served as Artistic Director from 1995 to 2010, and as Artistic Advisor until her death in 2022.)

Shadows of a Hot Summer

Bartoška graced the Thermal Grand Hall the morning after Opening Night too, less as President and more as part of the surviving cast-and-crew delegation for the premiere of the digital restoration of Stíny horkého léta (Shadows of a Hot Summer, 1978), a tense, allegorical, post-WWII-set, hostage drama. A lesser-known, late work by František Vláčil, it won the Best Film Crystal Globe in 1978 – was that what occasioned Vláčil’s setting fire to one or more Karlovy Vary hotels, as cheerfully recounted in Filmová lázeň (Film Spa), Miroslav Janek’s breezy 2015 documentary on KVIFF? Perhaps!

Consonant with the nostalgic, provincial flavour of the tributes to Bartoška on stage and screen, and in the media, a local nostalgia permeated key parts of the program too, with this year’s thematic centrepiece program, in tribute to the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death, being “The Wish to Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinema”. While fealty to historical titling (“Wunsch, Indianer zu werden”) is well and good, the translated term “Red Indian” doesn’t parse super well in 2024. Couldn’t this 22-film-strong, blockbuster program’s title have drawn on a different reference or allusion, one not carrying language long deprecated and pejorated? This would better have positioned Kafka as an author as relevant to life in 2024 as he surely still is today…

For a writer so indelibly associated with Prague and Czech culture (notwithstanding that Kafka was a German-speaking Jew who wrote in German), there were surprisingly few Czech(oslovak) productions among the selection. Vladimír Michálek’s Amerika (America, 1994) was the only direct adaptation, drawing upon Kafka’s first unfinished novel published in 1927, which bears that same name.

The program not only included adaptations but also films deemed Kafkaesque, allowing for far-flung inclusions like Tsukamoto Shinya’s berserk cyberpunk classic, Tetsuo (Tetsuo: The Iron Man, 1989) and Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi (The Money Order, 1968) as well as the innovative 1963 Czechoslovak New Wave precursor, Postava k podpírání (Joseph Kilian, Pavel Juráček and Jan Schmidt), in which a man rents a cat from a shop in old Prague but later finds the vendor impossible to locate. Befuddlement ensues.

Kafka

Prague also featured extensively on screen in two films in this program from festival guest Steven Soderbergh. There was not only a rare opportunity to catch his entertaining 1991 biopic-fantasia Kafka, in which a perfectly cast Jeremy Irons essayed the eponymous author mired in (imagined?) episodes from, and/or that informed, his other unfinished novels Der Process (The Trial, 1925) and Das Schloss (The Castle, 1926), but also Mr. Kneff, a 30-years-later, dialogue-free cannibalisation of that earlier work. With Mr. Kneff, Soderbergh shaved 20 minutes off Kafka’s runtime and took any number of liberties with it that are hard to begrudge him, even down to the incorporation of an instrumental version of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” – and how could there ever be such a thing as a definitive Kafka film anyway, given that author’s tendency toward incompletion?

Interviewed by KVIFF.TV, Soderbergh reflected that “Kafka was the last film that was made under the state-run film industry here. And that was fascinating in a lot of ways. If you’re a filmmaker, there were aspects of it that were amazing, because the amount of control that you could exert over the city itself physically was unprecedented. I’ve never experienced it since.”¹ Which sounds perfectly idyllic – if far from authentically Kafkaesque! More appositely, Kafka didn’t find success upon initial release; it strikes me as apt that it’s getting fresh exposure only now that there’s a recut version preferred by its maker also circulating.

Rudolf Noelte’s excellent 1968 West German production of Das Schloss was also included. A very faithful adaptation, notwithstanding its appendage of an ending (if one appropriately downbeat), it included a small role for Iva Janžurová. This legendary Czech actor was paid feature-length documentary tribute elsewhere in the program by her daughter Theodora Remundová, in Janžurka, rendered blandly as Actress in English. It’s a delightful homage to a prolific and beloved Czech actor who delivered indelible performances in key Czechoslovak films of the ‘60s and ‘70s. A number are excerpted in the film, like the wartime woodlands chamber drama, Kočár do Vídně (Coach to Vienna/Carriage to Vienna, Karel Kachyňa, 1966) and Juraj Herz’s brilliant back-to-back New Wave last gasps, Petrolejové lampy (Oil Lamps, 1971) and Morgiana (1972, in twin roles); we also see her excelling in excerpts from bláznivé komedie (“crazy comedies”) like Václav Vorlíček’s unhinged, pop art, body-swap satire, “Pane, vy jste vdova!“ (You Are a Widow, Sir, 1970 – this time in three roles!) These lesser-exported, often misguidedly derogated films kept her in work after “Normalisation” spelt an end not just to the Prague Spring but to Czechoslovakian film’s “Golden Sixties” – may that they should become much better known abroad!

Das Schloss

As is made clear in Actress, the still-effervescent Janžurová remains busy as a star of stage and screen – not to forget that she was the star of KVIFF’s trailer in 2022, an honour afforded prior recipients of a Crystal Globe. (She received hers for her “Contribution to Czech Cinematography” back in 2015; this year’s trailer’s star was a hard-boiled Benicio del Toro, a Festival President’s Award-winner in 2022.)

While KVIFF celebrated the centenary of Kafka’s death, the festival also celebrated 100 years since the birth of Václav Vorlíček’s principal, ostensibly friendly rival as a director of crazy comedies, Oldřich Lipský. This was but a one-film tribute, mind you, featuring Tajemství hradu v Karpatech (The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians, 1981), which parodies Jules Verne’s 1892 novel Le Château des Carpathes (The Carpathian Castle) with relish. Scripted by Lipský and Jiří Brdečka – collaborators previously on 1978’s Adéla ještě nevečeřela (Adele Hasn’t Had Her Dinner Yet / Dinner for Adele / Nick Carter in Prague which, like Carpathian Castle, unmistakably features animation by Jan Švankmajer) and Limonádový Joe aneb Koňská opera (Lemonade Joe, 1964), it’s a film sure to find a cult audience abroad now that it’s out on Blu-ray through Deaf Crocodile, and after Second Run and Criterion’s cultivation of an increased enthusiasm for the similarly Vernian cinema of Karel Zeman.

Killing the Devil

As wonderfully, retro-futuristically bonkers as this film is, I think KVIFF could have made a greater impression had they shown Lipský’s truly singular and radical Happy End (1967) instead – a revelatory film now out on Blu-ray through Second Run yet still little known even by Czech audiences. It shows, with virtuosic panache, that Christopher Nolan is far from the last word in cinema that plays with the passage of time. Moreover, Happy End’s rare lead role for the wonderful comedic actor Vladimír Menšík would have double-billed nicely with KVIFF’s screening of protean New Waver Ester Krumbachová’s digitally restored, sole directorial credit, Vražda ing. Čerta (Murdering the Devil / Killing the Devil / The Murder of Mr. Devil, 1970), in which an utterly unfettered, gluttonously diabolical Menšík quite literally chews the scenery opposite Jiřina Bohdalová. (The latter, another KVIFF trailer star circa 2019, was present to introduce the film, to rapturous applause.)

A highlight of my KVIFF this year was Jiří Mádl’s third film as director, Vlny (Waves), a world premiere presented outside of competition as a “Special Screening”. It’s a rare film on two levels: it’s a recent Czech film that should travel well, and a film concerning the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion that dramatises a story not already done to death. Its focus is on the team at the international news office of Czechoslovak Radio, leading up to their brave and ingenious broadcasting of the truth of the August ’68 invasion to a shocked nation as it happened, rather than toeing the party line by welcoming the occupation as a liberating force.

There’s unfamiliar archival footage that helps with a level of immersion into the period and the unfolding drama, uncompromised by recourse to widely recycled invasion imagery. Mádl reflected that, during the research phase of pre-production, “We were very lucky to find a lot of material […] that no one had seen before”, as “Whenever there’s a documentary about 1968 or about the Prague Spring, the material is always the same.”² Moreover, Mádl and co. didn’t just avail themselves of previously unseen actuality footage, but degraded material shot for the film to resemble it as well, such that documentary and dramatised imagery should become indistinguishable from one another, in the interests of a more transportive viewing experience. To a large extent, this worked very well. 

Waves

While not in competition, Waves was ultimately a Closing Night winner, garnering the Právo Audience Award. Among the Waves cast: a young up-and-comer named Josef Trojan, son of Ivan Trojan; the famed latter actor would receive a Festival President’s Award come Closing Night for his contribution to Czech cinema, and be paid tribute meantime by a screening of Petr Zelenka’s remarkable, meta-Dostoyevskian 2008 film Karamazovi (The Karamazovs), in which he is superb.

But what of the new?

I caught five films out of 12 from the main competition (and the same again from the “Proxima” strand – the latter now into its third year after deposing “East of the West” as KVIFF’s second-tier competition.) It’s the main competition I’ll focus on here. Based on the strength of the titles I caught, and mindful that the films ultimately awarded on Closing Night were almost entirely ones I didn’t, I’d have to say it looks to have been a strong year. While this year’s festival’s nostalgic ambience didn’t completely elude the competition – two of the biggest-name jurors were recent KVIFF visitors, with Killer Films’ Christine Vachon having attended last year, and Geoffrey Rush a Crystal Globe recipient the year prior – it appears that the festival’s programming and attendant prestige is on the rise.

Panoptikoni (Panoptikoni, George Sikharulidze) proved an incisive critique of contemporary Georgian masculinity and morality, and the forces that shape toxic elements within both, with an unusual redemption twist for morally slippery teen protagonist Sandro (Data Chachua). It notably also boasts an unexpected incorporation of a strongly Eastern European-accented cover of the ‘70s Baccara hit, “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie”! Another debut feature, Bruno Anković’s Proslava (Celebration) concerns a young man – and here, by extension, a nation – heeding the siren song of the far-right, but in a specific Croatian historical context and spanning, in a non-linear fashion, the period from 1926 to 1945. Speaking with friends after the screening, I learnt that Croatia’s flirtation with fascism is a scab not often picked at, making Celebration’s slow burn take on Eastern European miserablism all the more important an achievement.

Xoftex

At a hyperkinetic stylistic remove, Noaz Deshe’s Xoftex speaks with great urgency to the ongoing horrors in Palestine and, more directly, to the limbo Middle Eastern asylum seekers find themselves in once ensconced in refugee camps in, for salient example, Greece. With its origins in a visit by the director to a refugee camp named Softex near Thessaloniki, the gallows humour-heavy Xoftex centrally features refugees held in a colossal detention centre using smartphones to shoot a zombie film to pass the time. Deshe doesn’t make the refugees, heavily skewing male, out to all be saints – this isn’t agitprop, per se, and many of the refugees are unpleasantly casually machistic. However, one can’t help but be moved – nay, horrified – by their (exceedingly Kafkaesque) plight. The director is also the cinematographer, and more power to him – the cinematography is equal parts virtuosic and nightmarish. Xoftex is a hell of an achievement.

Two new Czech films graced the competition. Beata Parkanová’s Světýlka (Tiny Lights) charts a disintegrating marriage as partly perceived over the course of one day during a summer break by a needy six-year-old girl, Amálka (Mia Bankó). It’s finely observed, and the performances are all excellent – I especially enjoyed Veronika Žilková’s grandmother. She’s an actor who made an indelible impression upon me back in 2000 as the mother-of-sorts of a carnivorous log in Jan Švankmajer’s Otesánek (Little Otik); her babička here carries an echo of that earlier character’s manic maternal energy. I’m not at all clear though on the purpose of the intermittent, brief cutaways to 16mm (or faux-16mm?) footage, presented each time as if a frame, animated, within a roll of film.

Our Lovely Pig Slaughter

Then there was Adam Martinec’s dramedy, Mord. Literally translated, the title is “Murder”; instead, the English title has been rendered as Our Lovely Pig Slaughter. You’d be hard-pressed to come by a more off-putting title, even if you’re already au fait with the centuries-old, Czech winter tradition of zabijačka, in which a pig is ceremoniously killed and any number of attendees, across strict gender-segregationalist lines, play their part in the carnage, subsequent manufacture of smallgoods and, eventually, feasting.

Such an event provides ample opportunity to mine interfamilial and battle-of-the-sexes tensions mined already by countless Czech films to have come before it. While the synopsis in the program declared that it “evokes the masterworks of the Czechoslovak New Wave”³ – well, perhaps a few certain titles and, particularly, Jaroslav Papoušek’s Homolka Trilogy⁴ – Our Lovely Pig Slaughter doesn’t have much new to say about Czech traditional family values. Men are still all henpecked dolts, women are emasculating harpies, and everyone should know and stay in their place, even though no-one’s happy and everyone’s barely able to suppress their disdain for everyone else.

It’s very well made and performed, but very familiar.

Come Closing Night and the USD $25,000 Grand Prix was awarded to A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things. It wasn’t only Mark Cousins, its bekilted director, who seemed astonished by this. As I didn’t see his tribute to painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, I can’t comment on Cousins’ film’s merits, though I certainly assume it to possess some, as he is well proven to be no slouch – and that’s exactly the problem. It feels a little off that a filmmaker as accomplished, and as little in need of a boost as Cousins, was awarded, when there was clearly a lot of strong work produced by filmmakers much earlier in their careers vying for the same prize. Another film I missed, the existential Norwegian divorce drama Elskling (Loveable) from feature film debutante Lilja Ingolfsdottir, was the popular choice among much of the Thermal terrace bar-frequenting press cohort I spent a lot of time amongst at this year’s (every year’s!) festival. Furthermore, it swept the non-statutory awards, securing the FIPRESCI award for the best film in the Crystal Globe Competition; the Europa Cinemas Label, and the Grand Prix of the Ecumenical Jury. (The Ecumenical Jury additionally issued a commendation to Panopticon.)

Loveable

Loveable did win a strong Closing Night consolation prize, mind you, landing the USD $15,000 Special Jury Prize, while its lead Helga Guren won Best Actress. Xoftex and Our Lovely Pig Slaughter both were given Special Jury Mentions – but no moolah.

Once more, with feeling

A couple of days out from Closing Night, one of the festival’s big-name gets, Daniel Brühl, had this to say upon receiving the Festival President’s Award in the Grand Hall: “This is the most beautiful statuette, even more beautiful than the Oscar. And to receive it from the hands of the man who has been in charge of organising this festival for thirty years and is responsible for the fact that Karlovy Vary has become the temple of cinematography is a great honour for me.”⁵

In a festival “Moment of the Day” – a short video encapsulating a chosen happening from the day prior that runs ahead of each screening, Brühl receives his award intercut with doubtless contrived footage of Geoffrey Rush vacuuming the Grand Hall foyer’s red carpet alongside a row of Crystal Globes in display cases. As Brühl delivers his acceptance speech, Rush covetously presses a hand against one of these cases and looks out enviously, ostensibly at Brühl. This carries uncomfortable echoes of last year’s Johnny Depp-starring festival trailer in which the joke is that any celebrity who so much as turns up at Karlovy Vary is gifted a Crystal Globe – and yet Depp wasn’t, in an awkward acknowledgment of cancellation-connected controversies attached to the actor. Yet Rush was granted a Globe two years ago, notwithstanding being enmeshed in a similar controversy. Hmm…

KVIFF never resiles from inviting high-profile actors whose stars have dimmed elsewhere owing to (allegations of) misdeeds – so much so that any number of pundits I caught up with were half-expecting Kevin Spacey to be announced as a guest this year. (And lo! Beginning the very day after KVIFF ended, Yerevan’s Golden Apricot International Film Festival did roll out the red carpet to Kevin Spacey. So… perish the thought, but… perhaps next year?)

Nicole Holofcener and Casting Director colossus Francine Maisler brought some welcome distaff star power to the festival, but the biggest star appearances were those that bookended the festival. Viggo Mortensen (on Opening Night, when he gamely tried to speak a little Czech) and Clive Owen (on Closing Night) were both granted Festival President’s Awards by that man Bartoška – to whom Owen promptly deflected much of the applause meant for himself.

As is his wont, President Bartoška closed this year’s festival by announcing the dates of the next one (July 4-12 – one week later than this year, curiously), and by making a quip to the effect that he hopes still to be around for it. In an interview in the issue of Reflex gifted to festival guests, it’s noted that “It’s no secret that Jiří Bartoška is struggling with a serious illness”⁶ – indeed, he clearly cut a gaunter figure than he used to. While naturally wishing him only the best, one can’t help but wonder what manner of succession plan the festival has in place. This doesn’t only concern Bartoška; many of the key figures in the festival’s management, events and design teams have occupied their roles for as long, or close to as long, as the President has. The leadership skews glaringly, uncomfortably stagnantly, male, white and middle-aged, an impression only amplified in the post-Eva Zaoralová era.

Might one view Petr Folprecht’s official bowing out this year as a harbinger of change? While probably few KVIFF regulars even knew his name, countless festival-goers had become ardent fans of his over the last 30 years. Folprecht became a cult figure for his matter-of-fact microphone handling prowess, reliably receiving cheers and applause every time he’d lower mic stands after an introduction of a film in the Grand Hall, the better that it not obscure anyone’s view of its colossal screen.

Petr Folprecht, Artistic Director Karel Och & Executive Director Kryštof Mucha

His final assignation came after a short video tribute and a formal send-off from Artistic Director Karel Och, Executive director Kryštof Mucha and Head of Production, Petr Lintimer, KVIFF veterans all, for which Folprecht was, delightfully, granted a standing ovation.

What I saw at this year’s festival suggested a greater vitality to the competition than in recent years, so, no complaints there – but, just imagine… what might be possible if further changes should be rung in, in future? What, indeed! Not just speaking programmatically, but culturally… Can Kevin Spacey perhaps yet be kept at bay? Could a queer eye be brought to the staging of ceremonies? Is there – just imagine! – anyone else in the Czech lands who could MC a major event? Could such thoughts be entertained – even if, for now, just as passing flights of fancy – by any of those at the top, or by those bubbling under?

Dare I suggest that we watch this space? Thought it might be a little too soon to suggest that anyone hold their breath…

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
28 June – 6 July 2024
Festival website: https://www.kviff.com/en/homepage

Endnotes