There’s no one way to experience the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and no singular type of attendee. The Grandhotel Pupp is an 18th century resort that has been the center of social life. Here you can meet Netflix executives, members from the HFPA, and other filmmakers. You can also explore the dense forests around the Czech spa town, where you will find the ad hoc locations where hundreds of teens gather for a week-long party.
Head into a theater, however, and you’ll see those many worlds meet.
Boasting 453 screenings spread across nine days, this year’s edition wrapped this past weekend, awarding its top prize to the brooding Canadian-Iranian drama “Summer With Hope” ahead of a closing night presentation of George Miller’s “Three Thousand Years of Longing” – rather perfectly encapsulating the festival’s joint promise.
The Czech festival is still the largest in Eastern and Central Europe. Its Crystal Globe and Proxima contests shine a unique spotlight on films from the region. Karlovy Vary is a small festival of festivals that has helped to build buzz and support breakout films from Sundance, Berlin, and Cannes. These elements are vital to the Karlovy Vary brand.
“We want to reflect the full cinematic culture of the year,”Karel Och, artistic director. “We’ve always been a very ambiguous festival, or complex, if you want. We were born in 1946 and reborn in the early 1990s, so we’re old and young…. Classical on the surface, but with many idiosyncratic elements within.”
At this year’s edition, titles like Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner “Triangle of Sadness,” Matt Sarnecki’s Hot Docs–launched “The Killing of a Journalist” – about the 2018 murder of Slovakian journalist Ján Kuciak – and Sara Dosa’s Sundance acclaimed “Fire of Love”The event attracted a diverse range of people, from industry veterans to curious locals to young artists with particular connections to the artistic directors.
“’Fire of Love’ was the very first film my older son saw here,”Och smiled, beaming. “He’s 14 years old, and this was his first time at a screening – and he thought the film was terrific. So you could say it plays for multiple generations.”
It is expected that many more first-timers will be able share the experience in the near future. After a soft launch in 2021, the festival recently rolled out its amped-up KVIFF.tv platform, broadcasting talks, Q&As and red carpet coverage to the world during the nine-day event, while doubling as a cinema-focused VOD service throughout the rest of the year (with content geoblocked to the Czech Republic and Slovakia).
“We want to control the digital world,”Och explained. “We’ll always be a classic event focused on connecting filmmakers and audiences, but obviously we want to be as progressive as possible – to be more playful when mixing physical and digital distribution.”
The curatorial mandate of the artistic director was described as “gently edgy,” and of the 35 films that world premiered at this year’s festival, director Ioseb ‘Soso’ Bliadze’s “A Room of My Own”That description is quite fitting.
Written in collaboration with lead actress Taki Mumladze and produced on the fly during the strictest of Georgian lockdowns, the two-hander won a shared best actress prize for leads Mumladze and Mariam Khundadze, who play uneasy roommates-turned-confidantes-turned-lovers. The film isn’t a queer romance, but the character study is an important one. The film is more about growing up than it is about coming out.
Bliadze builds the film around a series of long and unflashy takes that call little attention to themselves while pulling viewers into a spacious Tbilisi flat – which, for budgetary and thematic reasons, the camera very rarely leaves.
Tina (Mumladze), tired and withdrawing, walks into the two-bedroom rental, a tight-wound cast-off from the patriarchy and a refugee who has suffered only physical and emotional traumas. Uninhibited in all the ways her roommate is reserved, party girl Megi (Mariam Khundadze) ushers the young divorcée out of her shell and into a more hedonistic freedom, with the requisite hangovers and regrets.
Less a foil than a simpatico young woman experiencing a similar liberation from an earlier point in the timeline, Megi herself feels just as hemmed in and suffocated by her native country – and benefiting from a more secular background and a greater command of English, she probably stands a better chance of escape. This is a snapshot of a repressive culture from the pandemic era. “A Room of My Own”This lockdown project is a great way to find a solution for modern ennui.