More Stars, Less Politics as Karlovy Vary Film Fest Rolls Out the Red Carpet

At this time last year, the organizers of the Karlovy Vary international film festival — the biggest cinema event in the Czech Republic and the premium A-list festival for all of Eastern Europe — were scrambling. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, just a few months earlier, had disputed the entire region. Filmmakers from Prague to Tallinn were rushing to show their support for the Ukrainian people and their battered industry. When the Odesa International Film Festival (OIFF), scheduled for July 2022, had to be canceled, festivals near Ukraine joined forces to show cross-border solidarity. Poland’s Warsaw Film Festival stepped up to host Odesa’s competition program. The PriFest in Kosovo opened up its schedule to screen full-length and short films by Ukrainian debutant directors.

And in Karlovy Vary, a festival best-known for its stunning location — in the number one spa town of the Czech Republic — and glamorous celebrity guests, organizers hosted the OIFF’s selection of works-in-progress, Ukrainian feature films in the final stages of shooting or post-production looking for financing or sales assistance to get over the line. As Krystof Mucha, Karlovy Vary’s executive director, noted at the time, instead of making a symbolic gesture, the Czech festival wanted to “really support Ukraine filmmakers in a concrete way.”

More from The Hollywood Reporter

• Netflix Inks 5-Year Deal With Japanese Screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto

• Caption This: Why Subtitling Is Big Business Amid the Content Boom

• 'Bird Box Barcelona' Trailer: New Beasts, Terrors Revealed in Sandra Bullock Movie Spinoff

A year on, fighting continues in Ukraine, but the country’s film industry has found a way to stand on its own. In February, in Berlin, the Odesa film festival unveiled its works-in-progress line-up, confirming it will be restarting the festival, in Ukraine, this summer. Also in Berlin, film bodies from 13 European countries, along with EFAD, the association of European film agency directors, announced a new solidarity fund that will provide development and completion funds for Ukrainian features.

“Our works-in-progress program was pretty successful, many of the filmmakers found partners and co-producers,” said Mucha, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of this year’s Karlovy Vary festival. “But now the Ukrainian film community wants to do things on their own and present their work in Ukraine, which is fantastic of course.”

Fantastic as well because it means, for 2023, the Czech festival can return to what it does best: Putting on a show.

The 57th edition of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, which kicks off Friday and runs through July 8, definitely has plenty of star wattage like earlier iterations. Alicia Vikander, Russell Crowe, Ewan McGregor and Robin Wright are coming to town to be honored, along with indie star producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, May December), while Patricia Clarkson is scheduled to attend as a juror. British electronic music band Morcheeba will get things going with a free concert in Karlovy Vary Friday evening before Cannes Film Festival hit Firebrand, starring Vikander as Queen Catherine Parr, the last wife of King Henry VIII, opens the fest. The screening will be followed by a performance by Russell Crowe’s blues-rock band Indoor Garden Party and fireworks over the Czech sky.

Ukraine isn’t completely absent from this year’s festival. This year’s lineup includes a special screening of Scream of My Blood: A Gogol Bordello Story, a documentary from directors Nate Pommer and Eric Weinrib on the American Romini punk band, co-founded by Ukrainian-born frontman Eugene Hütz, which who have been outspoken critics of the Russian invasion and active in raising relief funds for the Ukrainian victims of the war. Another documentary, Roman Liubyi’s Iron Butterflies, about the investigation into the 2014 downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine, which found Russian-backed forces shot down the civilian airline, which premiered in Sundance and Berlin, will also screen in Karlovy Vary.

But the focus this year is less politics and more cinema. The festival’s Crystal Globe competition — 11 movies, including nine world and two international premieres — features such highlights as Pascal Plante,’s Red Rooms, a Canadian darknet thriller; the Scandinavian satire The Hypnosis from directors Ernst De Geer, about a power couple trying to launch a women’s reproductive health app; and Czech filmmaker Matěj Chlupáček’s 1930s period drama We Have Never Been Modern.

Where the festival is showing its political colors is in regard to Iran. Fremont from Iran-born, London-based director Babak Jalali, which tells the story of a former Afghan translator for U.S. troops who now works in a U.S. fortune cookie factory, and Empty Nets, from Iranian filmmaker Behrooz Karamizade, a love story set in a small fishing village, will both screen in competition. Karlovy Vary has also picked nine recent independent Iranian features to highlight in a section titled “Another Birth. Iranian Cinema Here and Now.”

The selection includes two features from this year: Negin Ahmadi’s Dream’s Gate and Zapata from director Danesh Eqbashavi; two from 2022: Nader Saeivar’s No End and The Locust, directed by Faeze Azizkhani; Bahram Ark’s The Skin and Vahid Vakilifar’s K9, both from 2020; 2019 features Black and White River from director Farzin Mohammadi, and Hossein Rajabian’s Creation Between Two Surfaces; and the 2021 feature A Trip To The Moon, directed by Mohammadreza Shayan-Nejad.

“Collectively these works offer an insightful testimony of the burning creativity of Iran’s artists in the face of the challenging reality,” the Karlovy Vary fest said in a statement. “Nine mostly young filmmakers —urgent, unheard, voices — who palpably bear a spiritual connection to the previous generations of their country’s greats, tackle the current reality with a remarkable sensitivity and great inventiveness.”

In its Horizons sidebar, Karlovy Vary is again offering a best-of selection of some of this year’s festival favorites, including Cannes winners Anatomy of a Fall from Justine Triet, About Dry Grasses from Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days and Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves; Berlin favorites Orlando, My Political Biography from first-time director Paul B. Preciado and Ira Sachs’ Passengers, and Sundance hit Past Lives from writer-turned-filmmaker Celine Song.

“I missed Past Lives at Sundance because it screened near end of the festival and we were already back in the Czech Republic,” says Mucha, “so I’m very excited to see it. I’m really excited in general to meet all the big names we have this year, from Christine Vachon to Alicia Vikander and Ewan McGregor and Robin Wright, I’m just looking forward to celebrating again with the audience and the people here in town. I think it’s going to be a fantastic year.”

Karlovy Vary’s Special Screenings lineup this year includes the likes of Robert Kirchhoff’s documentary All Men Become Brothers about politician Alexander Dubček, “a contradictory figure in Czechoslovak history,” as fest organizers note, namely “the man who symbolized hope during the Prague Spring, the man who rose to the highest echelons of political power, only to be later removed from office,” as well as Robert Hloz’s sci-fi drama Restore Point, which is set in a world where humanity has achieved the ability to cheat death.

Meanwhile, the second year of Karlovy Vary’s second competition section, Proxima, includes such highlights as Birth from South Korean director Ji-young Yoo, about an unplanned pregnancy that throws a couple off course, Albert Hospodářský’s environmental sci-fi drama Brutal Heat, Iranian director Karim Lakzadeh’s Dark Matter, about an actor, an actress and a cameraman who set out to make their own movie, Saurav Rai’s Indian feature Guras which follows a nine-year-old girl searching for her missing dog while her family struggles for survival, and Camila Rodríguez Triana’s Latin American drama The Song of the Auricanturi, which explores family relationships in the wake of the trauma of war.

Karel Och, the Karlovy Vary festival’s artistic director, calls the introduction of Proxima “one of the most important milestones of the last decade for the festival.” Replacing the former East of the West section with Proxima allowed a pivot “opening it to the entire world,” which has created “more space for premiering movies,” he explains to THR.

The change and the post-COVID return to more normalized filmmaking meant that for its 2023 edition, the Karlovy Vary team had to sift through “400 more submissions” than last year, around 2,000 submissions, Och highlights.

Concludes the film selector: “Now we have two competitions, packed with world premieres from around the world.”

But he emphasizes that Karlovy Vary continues to like mixing this offering of new discoveries and fresh film fare with highlights from the festival circuit, which typically sees the Czech event screening several dozen movies that debuted in such places as Berlin and Cannes. Among them:

The Karlovy Vary fest’s Eastern Promises Industry Days, meanwhile, will once again provide a platform for discussions about key film sector topics, from streaming and financing to the use of and outlook for AI.

Finally, Karlovy Vary will also showcase films from a Japanese director. “Long neglected in most of the Western world, the zany films of Japanese filmmaker Yasuzo Masumura (1924-1986) have been gaining traction over the past decade, attracting new devotees and forcing critics and academics to reassess his ascribed position within the Japanese New Wave,” organizers highlight. “Two decades after his work began to circulate across in Europe and the U.S., albeit in limited capacities, the films of Masumura now rank among the biggest film discoveries of the 21st century – a highly eclectic, unabashedly confrontational body of work with rebellious politics and highly distinctive aesthetics.”

The jury deciding the Crystal Globe honors, set to be handed out at the end of the 57th edition of the Karlovy Vary festival, again includes star power. Joining Tunisian film producer Dora Bouchoucha (Buried Secrets, Foreign Body), Slovenian director Olmo Omerzu (Family Film, Winter Flies) and Sundance festival programmer John Nein are Irish actor Barry Ward (The End of the F***ing World) and Oscar nominee Clarkson (Pieces of April, Far from Heaven, Sharp Objects). Clarkson has enjoyed time in Karlovy Vary before. Back in 2019, she received, along with Julianne Moore, the Karlovy Vary festival’s Crystal Globe award for outstanding artistic contributions to world cinema.

Best of The Hollywood Reporter

• Natalie Portman at Cannes: "I Need to Leave the Drama for the Screen"

• Diane Keaton: "You’re Gonna Pray to Get Off This Call"

• Ailing ‘Superman’ Star Valerie Perrine Finally Finds Her Hero: "The Guy Should Be Sainted"

Click here to read the full article.