Time Out of Mind directed by Oren Moverman and starring Richard Gere and Jena Malone, will open the 50th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Richard Gere will also be presented with festival’s highest award, the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema.
In the film, Richard Gere plays a homeless man, who is thrown out of his ramshackle apartment and on to the street, with everything he owns in two plastic bags. This powerful story from the life of a homeless person in today’s New York offers a soulful character study of a man whose only hope in an otherwise desperate existence is to try to find reconciliation with his long estranged daughter.
In addition to Time Out of Mind (2014), The Karlovy Vary IFF will showcase Richard Gere’s other new film – the drama Franny (2015), the story of a philanthropist who gets involved in the lives of a young married couple in the attempt to compensate for traumas of the past.
Born in Philadelphia, Gere devoted himself to music from an early age. Beginning in the 1970s he performed in various theaters and gradually began getting film roles. Richard Gere has also been acknowledged around the world for his clear stances on social issues. He is a personal friend of the Dalai Lama and a steadfast defender of human rights and independence in Tibet. He has also actively stood up for the need to combat AIDS, and is an important donor benefactor and supporter of numerous charity organizations.
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will close with a screening of one of the hits of this year’s Sundance festival, Sleeping with Other People, directed by Leslye Headland (pictured above).
The romantic comedy is a wink across a quarter of a century to Rob Reiner’s cult film When Harry Met Sally, with all its sparkling dialogue and disarming humour. Jake and Lainey spend one crazy night together in a college dorm room, the first such affair for both of them. When they run into each other in New York twelve years later, they find out that in the meantime both of their love-lives have been dogged by problems with infidelity. They make a deal to form a strictly platonic friendship in spite of a strong mutual attraction for the sake of helping each other find a healthy relationship.