The 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) will open with Vigo Mortensen’s film The Dead Don’t Hurt and honor Mortensen with this year’s President’s Award at the opening ceremony.
British actor Clive Owen and actor, director, producer, and multiple European Film Award-winner Daniel Brühl Daniel Brühl will also receive the KVIFF President’s Award.
On the occasion of Clive Owen receiving the KVIFF President’s Award, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will show the award-winning Closer, which was released twenty years ago. On the occasion of receiving the KVIFF President’s Award, Daniel Brühl will present his directorial debut Next Door.
The festival will screen two of Steven Soderbergh’s film, Kafka and Mr. Kneff as a part of the festival’s Kafka retrospective program titled The Wish to Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinema. Soderbergh will present his two films in person.
The mysterious drama Kafka (1991), which Steven Soderbergh shot in Prague with Jeremy Irons in the title role, is a sophisticated blending of Kafka’s real life with fiction, although viewers have absolutely no way of knowing whether the events in the film are real or the fruits of the author’s imagination.
Thirty years later, Soderbergh decided to re-edit Kafka to create an entirely new film. Set in Prague in 1919, Mr. Kneff is the story of a writer who uses his dead-end job as inspiration for his writing. The new version is twenty minutes shorter, with a rearranged narrative structure. In addition, Soderbergh colorized some of the scenes to more clearly differentiate between reality and the main protagonist’s imagination. The film also has a different soundtrack, which among other things includes an instrumental version of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” Mr. Kneff, which can be described as a film about Kafka without Kafka, is characterized by a noticeably greater dose of surrealism and sense of alienation than the original film.
Oscar nominated director and screenwriter Nicole Holofcener will also present three film from her award-winning career at this year’s 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
Other renowned filmmakers such as Michel Franco, Juho Kuosmanen, Sergei Loznitsa, Rúnar Rúnarsson, Daniele Luchetti, and Ti West will also present their latest films to Karlovy Vary audiences.
Nicole Holofcener, one of the most eminent voices of American independent cinema of the ´90ies and noughties has written and directed seven feature-length films, whose qualities have been appreciated by critics and audiences alike. Holofcener’s measured mix of observational comedy, understated social commentary, and female character studies are not as well-known in Central and Eastern Europe as in the United States, where they have found a home at Sundance in particular. One example is the gently scathing yet charming comedy of manners Please Give (2010), starring Oliver Platt and Holofcener’s regular collaborator Catherine Keener. The romantic comedy Enough Said (2013), a bittersweet meditation on the anxieties of middle age, brought together American comedy icon Julia-Louis Dreyfus and the incomparable James Gandolfini (sadly, in one of his final roles) under Holofcener’s empathetic direction. The latest film by this chronicler of American middle-class life, You Hurt My Feelings (2023), proves that even the story of a long marriage unexpectedly beset by a major crisis can be told in a sensitively humorous way.
The Mexico-born world citizen Michel Franco, a director, screenwriter, editor, and producer whose films have won awards at the Cannes and Venice, will travel to Karlovy Vary to present the Czech premiere of his 2023 drama Memory. Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, whose performance earned him the Volpi Cup at last year’s Venice Film Festival, shine in this intense romantic drama characterized by a subtle yet profound understanding of humanity in its purest form.
Finnish star director Juho Kuosmanen returns to Karlovy Vary with his Silent Trilogy, three short films that present a playful and humorous celebration of people on the margins of society. Kuosmanen previously demonstrated his love for the history of cinema in the festival gems The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki and Compartment No. 6.
The work of Sergei Loznitsa, who has visited the Karlovy Vary festival with his films with almost iron-clad regularity since the turn of the millennium, is an uncompromising aesthetic and political “bridge” between East and West. In his observational documentary The Invasion, he recounts the actions of the people who have resisted oppression on a daily basis since the Russian invasion began.
Iceland’s Rúnar Rúnarsson will be on hand to present When the Light Breaks, his emotionally complex study of dealing with sudden loss and pain, which opened the Un Certain Regard section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Returning to Karlovy Vary this year is legend of Italian cinema Daniele Luchetti with his drama Trust. For this film, Luchetti once again turned to his long-time collaborator Elio Germano, to play the lead role. This extremely successful actor-director duo first met while working on My Brother is an Only Child (2006).
The work of master of unconventional independent horror Ti West has gained a cult following over the years. West will be in Karlovy Vary in person to introduce MaXXXine, the final installment in his X trilogy, produced by A24.
European Film Promotion alongside Karlovy Vary International Film Festival selected ten participants to be offered an extended industry program for EFP Future Frames. The program will be mentored by award-winning Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco. Franco will hold an exclusive masterclass for the program on 2 July. His most recent feature film, Memory, which premiered in competition at the 2023 Venice Film Festival and earned Peter Sarsgaard the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, will be screened at this year’s KVIFF.
The 2024 Future Frames Selection:
Austria: Matthias Krepp | Strangers in the Night
Belgium: Marthe Peters | Baldilocks
Czech Republic: Marie-Magdalena Kochová | 3 MWh
Denmark: William Sehested Høeg | The Complaint
Germany: Hilke Rönnfeldt | A Study of Empathy
Iceland: Anna Maria Joakimsdottir-Hutri | Who Stands Up for Alvar
Italy: Emanuela Muzzupappa | Love’s Servant
Romania: Bogdan Alecsandru | If I Float
Slovakia: Katarína Gramatová | A Good Mind Grows in Thorny Places
Spain: Lucía G. Romero | Cura Sana