The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (July 1-9) will open this Friday with Italian director Paolo Genovese’s relationship drama Superheroes and close with George Miller’s Cannes title Three Thousand Years of Longing, it has revealed in a final pre-kick-off announcement.
Alessandro Borghi and Jasmine Trinca co-star in Genovese’s romance exploring the high and lows of the relationship between a comic book illustrator and theoretical physicist
It is the 11th feature of Genovese, who is best known internationally for his 2016 couple comedy-drama Perfect Strangers which was hit at home and went on to be adapted for multiple territories.
Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing – starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba – world premiered out of competition at Cannes last May.
The festival also revealed that US actor and director Liev Schreiber and former Cannes Marché du Film head Jerôme Paillard will be guests this year. Other previously announced international guests include Geoffrey Rush and Benicio del Toro.
Schreiber was last at the festival in 2004 with actor Elijah Wood to talk about his then-upcoming, Czech-filmed directorial debut Everything is Illuminated (2005).
Adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer’s story of a young American man looking for his roots in Ukraine, it would go on to world premiere in the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons sidebar in 2005, winning the Laterna Magica Prize and a Biografilm Award.
The actor and director had been drawn to the novel through his mother’s roots in Ukraine’s Jewish community.
His presence at Karlovy Vary will coincide with the attendance of a large Ukrainian delegation as the country’s film industry attempts to keep working against the backdrop of the war with Russian invading forces.
Paillard, who has just stepped down as the head of the Cannes Marché du Film in a long-planned exit, will be feted with a special tribute to his career. As part of the tribute, the festival will screen the 1993 film The Flood which Paillard produced. He will introduce the film.
In final news, KVIFF has also added a trio of Cannes 2022 titles to the line-up in the shape of Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream, Riley Keough’s War Pony and Lukas Dhont’s Palme d’Or contender Close, which won the Grand Prix.
The festival has also invited US films Level 34 by Zach Breder and My Sister Liv by Alan Hicks to the People Next Door section.