Karlovy Vary’s Competitions and Specials
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Before this year’s Cannes gave us Josh O’Connor as Paul Mescal’s secret lover in Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound and as a rascally art thief in Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, Sundance “showed us a Josh O’Connor we’ve never seen before,” wrote Vulture’s Fran Hoepfner, who declared back in January that O’Connor “has entered his Sad Dad Era.” In Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding, one of eleven films Karlovy Vary has just lined up for its Crystal Globe Competition, O’Connor plays Dusty, a Colorado rancher who has lost nearly everything he owns to a merciless wildfire.
Separated from Ruby (Meghann Fahy), Dusty suddenly has more time for their daughter, Callie Rose (Lily LaTorre), and as he absorbs late lessons in fatherhood, O’Connor delivers “the latest in a remarkable string of performances, and one that’s matched beat for poignant beat by the other members of the central cast,” writes Sheri Linden for the Hollywood Reporter. “With his understanding of and affection for the hardy inhabitants of the mountainous American West, Walker-Silverman brings a new and tender radiance to the idea of regional filmmaking.”
Karlovy Vary, whose fifty-ninth edition will run from July 4 through 12, usually selects twelve features for its main competition. It has again this year, but details on one will remain under wraps for a while. “The remaining one comes from Iran,” says artistic director Karel Och, and “for the safety of its makers, it has been decided to postpone its announcement until closer to the festival.”
Among the eleven announced on Tuesday morning is the new feature from Bence Fliegauf, whose Just the Wind (2012) won three awards in Berlin, including the Grand Prix. In Jimmy Jaguar, a demon drifts across Hungarian plains, taking possession of victims who become hell-bent on revenge.
An Afghan mother risks everything to search for her lost son without being detected by the Taliban as a woman on the move in Gözde Kural’s Cinema Jazireh. Ondřej Provazník’s Broken Voices explores the ramifications of the special attention paid to a thirteen-year-old singer by the director of a world-famous girls’ choir.
Last summer, two films from Lithuania cleaned up at Locarno, and Vytautas Katkus is surely hoping to maintain the winning streak with The Visitor, a film that he says “asks what it means to revisit the places, people, and emotions we thought were long behind us.” Danielius, a Lithuanian who has set up a new life in Norway, is called back to his hometown after his father dies. Katkus tells Variety’s Leo Barraclough that The Visitor is “about arriving too late, or staying too long, and confronting what still lingers.”
The Proxima Competition focuses on “progressive tendencies in filmmaking,” and this year’s lineup features twelve world premieres and one international premiere, Federico Atehortúa Arteaga’s Forensics, an experimental essay on efforts to reconstruct the life of a trans woman who went missing in Colombia. One of the world premieres, Sand City, has just been picked up by the Bangkok-based company Diversion. In Bangladeshi filmmaker Mahde Hasan’s debut feature, a sand collector becomes obsessed with a severed finger she’s found.
Playing neighbors in a small English town, Brenda Blethyn and Andrea Riseborough star in Paul Andrew Williams’s Dragonfly, one of nine Special Screenings. Another is Caravan, Zuzana Kirchnerová’s debut feature and the first Czech film in more than thirty years to premiere in a competition in Cannes—in this case, Un Certain Regard. A single mother (Anna Geislerová) and her disabled teenaged son (David Vodstrčil) head out on a road trip through Italy. “Caravan ultimately emerges as a gentle, effective humanist drama,” finds Screen’s Allan Hunter.
With The Czech Film Project, directors Marek Novák and Mikuláš Novotný pose the question, “What makes a Czech film Czech?” The answer now is more elusive than it was in the 1960s during the emergence of what came to be known as the Czechoslovak New Wave. Back in April, Karlovy Vary announced that it would present the premiere of a new restoration of one of that movement’s final features, Jaroslav Papoušek’s Ecce Homo Homolka (1969).
An artist who worked as a screenwriter with Miloš Forman on Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Firemen’s Ball (1967) and with Ivan Passer on Intimate Lighting (1965), Papoušek cast Forman’s sons Petr and Matěj as the twin grandkids of Grandpa Homolka, played by New Wave stalwart Josef Šebánek. A family outing in the countryside “slowly turns into an outlandish comic satire,” notes the festival, adding that many of the lines uttered by the characters “have become unforgettable catchphrases for later generations of viewers.”
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