‘Bikechess,’ a Dark Comedy About Journalism in Kazakhstan, Wins Karlovy Vary Works in Progress Award

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Seven films have been selected for the 11th edition of Final Cut in Venice, the works-in-progress section of the 80th Venice Film Festival. Final Cut in Venice, which runs Sept. 3-5, provides support for the completion of films from Africa and five Middle Eastern countries: Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria. It is one of the programs run by the festival’s industry section, Venice Production Bridge. Over three days, the working copies of the selected films will be presented to producers, buyers, distributors, post-production companies and film festival programmers. The first two days are devoted to screenings, and then one-to-one meetings between the producers of the projects and the professionals attending the Venice Production Bridge will take place on the third day. The program will conclude with the awarding of prizes in kind or in cash, the purpose of which is to provide support for the films’ post-production.

Sheila Rubin has finally reached the peak of her fitness career. What started with a small business she worked on at her house has turned into a fitness empire.

Jessica Kiang At a festival the size and stature of the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary, new discoveries are a daily occurrence. But it is rare that at festival’s end, one of the most excitingly buzzy emergent names should be that of a filmmaker who died 27 years ago and who has languished in relative obscurity – certainly in the Anglophone world – ever since. And yet here we are, at the tail end of an 11-film Yasuzo Masumura retrospective – the biggest of its kind ever mounted at an international film festival – that has proved, in a word, revelatory.  It’s not just in terms of blowing the dust from this extraordinary, unjustly overlooked filmmaker’s catalog, but also in the broader sense of being an exemplary model for how to connect a vibrant, youthful regional audience to global film history. There is a classic film fan born every minute, but in Karlovy Vary this year, you could feel it happen in real time during the screenings of Masumura’s  “A Cheerful Girl” (1957), “Hoodlum Soldier” (1965), “Spider Tattoo” (1966) and so on.  

The 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival has concluded yet another wonderful week of cinematic discoveries. Previously announced awards were given to a variety of contributors to global cinema.

The 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (June 30 – July 8) came to a close this evening with an awards ceremony that bestowed two key prizes to contemporary Bulgarian drama Blaga’s Lessons (Urotcite Na Blaga) by director Stephan Komandarev.

For writer-director Naqqash Khalid, questions are more important than answers and this premise is something the academic-turned-filmmaker explores heavily in his debut film In Camera, which recently premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The bold film, which opened to positive reviews after it screened in the fest’s Proxima section last week, is the first feature to come out of the 2019 iFeatures slate, the low-budget Creative UK scheme from the UK’s BFI Film Fund and BBC Film. 

Dennis Harvey Film Critic In the diverse annals of survivalist cinema, one lesson is clear: Death is surely preferable to an eternity (or even 95 minutes) spent trapped with the inimitable duo of Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin in 1996’s “Bio-Dome.” By contrast, the dystopian-future-style living is pretty easy to take in “Biosphere,” given the more amiable company of stars Sterling K. Brown and Mark Duplass. They play besties stuck for the long haul in a self-sustaining habitat after some murky catastrophe has rendered the world outside lethal.  This first directorial feature for producer Mel Eslyn (who co-wrote with Duplass) is a somewhat uneven construct that at times threatens to exhaust its bro-comedy goodwill. But ultimately the performers are winning enough, and the ideas in the ambiguous story intriguing enough, to achieve an end result of successful middleweight charm and substance.

Winner of the Caméra d’Or for the best first feature film last month at the Cannes Film Festival, writer-director Pham Thien An’s “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” is a deeply felt three-hour spiritual odyssey about grief in its many forms.  READ MORE: ‘You Sing Loud, I Sing Louder’ Review: A Vulnerable Ewan McGregor Can’t Save This Father-Daughter Addiction Drama [Karlovy Vary] An impressive tracking shot moves from a nighttime soccer game through a lively street in Saigon before settling on friends having send-off drinks for a member of the group who is forsaking the city for a simple life in the mountains.

Boy meets girl is a tale as old as time and one that Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki has visited several times in a career that has spanned forty years, including in his latest romantic tragicomedy “Fallen Leaves.” His 20th feature film is a continuation of what’s been dubbed his Proletariat Trilogy, following “Shadows in Paradise,” “Ariel, “and “The Match Factory Girl.” While each film follows similar plotting, Kaurismäki places a direct emphasis on his unique working-class characters and a humanistic worldview, despite the external harshness of the world around them.  Continue reading ‘Fallen Leaves’ Review: Aki Kaurismäki’s Romantic Tragicomedy Finds Love In A Hopeless Place [Karlovy Vary] at The Playlist.

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival’s Eastern Promises industry strand has unveiled the winners of it’s project showcases, which took place at the fest from July 2-4.

Emerging Danish director Amalie-Maria Nielsen has been announced as the first recipient of a new Los Angeles-based scholarship, created in collaboration with the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), talent agency UTA and management company Range Media Partners.

The unseen and the obscene are the subject of Pascal Plante’s disturbingly brilliant psychological horror, which takes an overused genre — the serial killer movie — and an often-misused technique — dark Lynchian surrealism — and somehow alchemizes the two into something new and original. It’s strong meat for sure (the courtroom-drama framing is deceptive, since this is not really a film about justice), but word-of-mouth cult status beckons, and a healthy nightlife on the genre circuit is assured.

EXCLUSIVE: Christine Vachon offered her outlook on some of the industry’s most pressing issues at a keynote masterclass session this afternoon at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Will Tizard Contributor In Robert Hloz’s sci-fi feature debut “Restore Point,” second chances are big business. In the year 2041, anyone who has an unnatural death has the right to be brought back to life, provided they’ve dutifully created a backup of their personality called a “restore point.” Naturally, some object to the notion of artificially extending life ad infinitum, wherein the story begins to get complicated. “I wanted to make a sci-fi film since I was a little kid,” Hloz says, “but I would never guess that it will happen to be my debut. I thought maybe third, fourth film.”

Nick Holdsworth Naqqash Khalid always wanted to make films. An English literature graduate of Salford University in Manchester, England, who began his working life as a lecturer in the university’s School of Arts and Media, Khalid dreamed of working with actors to create films that reflect our 21st century experience of a fractured world, dominated by mobile phones and social media, where time no longer seems to follow a linear path. His chance to make his dreams reality came when a script he wrote while still teaching at Salford was picked up by iFeatures – a BBC Film/Creative England/British Film Institute program for debut directors. A development grant in early 2020 enabled him to realize his script “In Camera,” which had its world premiere Saturday in Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s Proxima competition slot (for the Variety review see here).

You know the modern world is in a dark place when even a middle-aged Iranian woman says that things were better in the old days. Indeed, for his feature debut, director Behrooz Karamizade has fashioned an intelligent and thoughtful drama that should travel well in today’s climate of insecurity, offering a fresh perspective on a multiplicity of worldwide issues (trickle-down theory, the gig economy) while adding an especially nuanced subplot exploring the refugee crisis and the mechanics of people-trafficking.  

Brave is the man who will sign up for a real-life father-daughter road movie set the aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, but Ewan McGregor his no regrets about pairing up with his eldest child — by his first wife — for You Sing Loud, I Sing Louder, which screened as a tribute to the actor in Karlovy Vary. Set in a dreamlike American West, and very far removed from the specifics of the McGregors’ own personal situation, it finds a reformed alcoholic dad trying to reconnect with his offspring after collecting her from hospital. She thinks they’re off to visit an artist friend of her father’s, but the truth is that, in a bid to absolve himself of many years’ worth of guilt, he’s taking her to rehab.

The raucous period drama “Firebrand” was the official opening-night film at the 57th annual Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on Friday night in the spa resort town outside Prague, but there was a lot more going on in and around the Grand Hall at the Hotel Thermal than just the on-screen battle between Alicia Vikander’s Catherine Parr and Jude Law’s King Henry VIII. It also included the presentation of awards to Vikander and Russell Crowe, the usual complement of opening-night speeches, an extended dance number that appeared to be performed on ice skates (though it wasn’t on ice but on an artificial surface that mimicked ice but could be walked on safely) and, during breaks and after the movie, complete concerts by the British band Morcheeba and by Crowe’s nine-piece band, Indoor Garden Party.

The 57th Karlovy Vary Film Festival opened last night with a spirited musical performance from Russell Crowe, and the energy remained high this evening with actor Ewan McGregor in town to receive the fest’s honorary President’s Award.

Given the stories that Russell Crowe was still celebrating his open-air concert at Karlovy Vary’s Thermal Hotel until the small hours of the morning, there was little surprise that the actor was late for his meeting with a group of international journalists. However, the 59-year-old showed no signs of wear and tear, and even graciously insisted the press conference go on past its strict 30-minute cut-off time.