Karlovy Vary 2023

KVIFF attendees will be able to catch up with several of this year’s major prizewinners from Cannes, including Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (Palme d’Or), Thien An Pham’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Camera d’Or), Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves (Jury Prize), Trần Anh Hùng’s The Pot-au-feu (Best Director), Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster (Best Screenplay), Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses (Best Actress for Merve Dizdar), and Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days (Best Actor for Koji Yakusho) as well as a few critical favorites, such as Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera, Sean Price Williams’s The Sweet East, and Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents.

Bank employee Morán (Daniel Elias) steals enough money to retire on, fully aware that he will be caught. He’s done the math. The time he’ll do is worth the trade-off. “But his accomplice on the outside, Román (Esteban Bigliardi), gets distracted by another kind of escape from drudgery, in the form of a radiant free spirit, Norma (Margarita Molfino), he meets in the countryside,” writes Nicolas Rapold, introducing his interview with the director for Filmmaker. “That detour, and other twists, set The Delinquents apart from the usual ticking heist plot, along with Moreno’s especially smooth control of tone, comedic aplomb, and a characterful cast. With Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen recently out in the U.S., some have drawn comparisons within Argentine cinema, but Moreno’s storytelling has its own sly appeal and mysterious drive.”

KVIFF 2023 will also screen breakouts from this year’s Sundance, including A. V. Rockwell’s Grand Jury Prize–winning A Thousand and One, Celine Song’s Past Lives, and Ira Sachs’s Passages. From Berlin come more award winners: Nicolas Philibert’s On the Adamant (Golden Bear), Bas Devos’s Here (Encounters Award), Paul B. Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography (Encounters Special Jury Prize), Tatiana Huezo’s The Echo (Encounters Award for Best Director), and Lila Avilés’s Tótem (Prize of the Ecumenical Jury).

The Out of the Past program will feature the world premiere of a new restoration of Courage for Every Day (1964), the debut feature from Evald Schorm and a key work of the Czechoslovak New Wave. Jan Kačer plays “a slogan-spouting, blockheaded factory worker—a model product of the Stalinist old regime,” wrote an anonymous Time reviewer in 1967. “Representing the newer, more relaxed style of Communism are his cheeky blonde mistress (Jana Brejchová) and an impudent young cynic (Josef Abrhám), who refuses to echo Kačer’s unquestioning beliefs. A puritanical bore who turns off friends and fellow factory workers, Kačer is beaten in a beer hall by resentful colleagues, ultimately comes to realize that his pompous pronunciamentos can no longer be the life of the Party.”

Every festival has its avant section, and KVIFF’s is Imagina. Among the highlights this year is Pedro Costa’s new short. “A tripartite screen test for a feature,” writes Christopher Small in the Notebook, The Daughters of Fire is “no less self-contained or beguiling for being a fragment.” Imagina also offers new work from James Benning (Allensworth), Luke Fowler (Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait), and Ana Vaz, whose It Is Night in America was shot in Brasilia during the pandemic, when wild animals roamed the empty streets. “If It Is Night in America is a dirge for man’s lost creaturely instincts, it is also an ode to the possibilities of cinema that serves to reclaim these dormant instincts,” writes Ela Bittencourt—also in the Notebook.

Karlovy Vary will spotlight new cinema from Iran and the varied career of Yasuzo Masumura (Giants and Toys, Blind Beast), and eleven films will compete for the festival’s top prize, the Crystal Globe. Talking to Martin Kudláč at Cineuropa, KVIFF artistic director Karel Och notes that for the third consecutive year, two films from the Czech Republic are premiering in the main competition. Tomáš Klein’s Sensitive Person is a loose adaptation of Jáchym Topol’s comic novel about the complicated relationship between a father and his son, and Matěj Chlupáček’s We Have Never Been Modern draws on the true story of the discovery of the dead body of a newborn intersex baby in a factory in the 1930s.

“I would argue that filmmakers in their thirties are assuming a leading role in our domestic cinematic landscape,” says Och. “These are creatives who are active in a period less pressurized than the transformative 1990s, a time of political, social, and economic shifts in the country.”