Karlovy Vary: Awards and Masumura

A star of Bulgarian cinema in the 1980s and ’90s—she won a Bulgarian Academy Award for her leading performance in Emil Tzanev’s Mme Bovary from Sliven (1991)—Skorcheva returns from a thirty-year break to play a retired teacher who loses her life savings to a band of scammers. In order to stay afloat, she sacrifices all her principles and joins forces with the very criminals who ripped her off.

Blaga’s Lessons is “tense, tough-minded fare that isn’t afraid to test the bounds of realism for the sake of a good story,” writes Lodge, but it “nonetheless feels authentically rooted in an ailing, neglected strand of Bulgarian society. Like much of Komandarev’s work, it marries a stern social conscience to a crowd-pleasing flair for genre—at least until a bluntly provocative denouement that will divide viewers along ‘what would you do’ lines.”

Introducing his interview with Behrooz Karamizade for Variety, Ed Meza writes that Empty Nets, the Iranian-German director’s debut feature and the winner of the Special Jury Prize, “offers a sobering look at the increasingly difficult, sometimes hopeless lives of young working-class people in Iran as they strive for better lives.” Iranian filmmaker Babak Jalali won Best Director for Fremont, the story of an Afghan immigrant working at a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco. In her Variety review, Tomris Laffly calls Fremont, which will close out the festival in Edinburgh later this summer, “a lovely, low-budget mood piece with a hypnotically deadpan temperament.”

Swedish director Ernst De Geer’s first feature, The Hypnosis, won the Best Actor award for Herbert Nordrum as well as the FIPRESCI Prize and the European Cinema Label Award. Nordrum plays André, the life and business partner of Vera (Asta Kamma August). The couple has created a women’s health app that they’re about to pitch to prospective investors, but before they do, Vera decides to undergo hypnotherapy in order to stop smoking. She emerges from her first session an entirely different person, having lost all her social inhibitions.

“Executing some toe-curling displays of social faux pas played straight that would make Michael Haneke blush, August and Nordrum are a winning pair of leads,” writes Hannah Strong at Little Whites Lies. “They’re charming enough that even when they act out—with crimes ranging from a bit irritating to possibly illegal, definitely immoral—it’s hard to not watch them with at least a little affection.”

Exciting as it is to see so many new talents emerging, for many attendees, the great discovery at KVIFF 2023 was the eleven-film Yasuzo Masumura retrospective. “There is a classic film fan born every minute, but in Karlovy Vary this year, you could feel it happen in real time during the screenings of Masumura’s A Cheerful Girl (1957), Hoodlum Soldier (1965), Spider Tattoo (1966), and so on,” writes Jessica Kiang, who talks with programmer Joseph Fahim and KVIFF artistic director Karel Och for Variety.

The selection curated by Fahim and his team “represents only the tip of the sixty-title iceberg of Masumura’s filmography,” writes Kiang, and it is “remarkable for how, across nearly a dozen features, the director so rarely repeats himself. Encompassing the melodrama, satire, buddy comedy, erotica, exploitation, courtroom, espionage (industrial and political), coming-of-age, and romance genres, presented in crisply restored widescreen black-and-white and gorgeously punchy, vivid technicolor, the program is diverse, but never less than wildly entertaining.”