Ewan McGregor Pays Tribute To Daughter Clara As He Accepts Karlovy Vary President’s Award: “The Highlight Of What I’ve Done Is To Act With My Daughter”

So many stars are paying tribute to Tony Bennett after his death.

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.

Will Tizard Contributor Bulgarian crime story “Blaga’s Lessons” by Stephan Komandarev scored the top prize and $25,000 at the 57th Karlovy Vary Film Festival on Saturday, capping a week of celebrating art film, stars and bold global work. With sold out screenings ranging from Russell Crowe introducing “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” to rare Japanese masterworks by Yasuzo Masumura and a tribute to actor Daniela Kolarova, Czech audiences proved once again to be hungry for every kind of film they cannot experience at any other venue. The Crystal Globe competition special jury prize, along with $15,000, went to “Empty Nets,” a German-Iranian gritty love story directed by Behrooz Karamizade.

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. 

Stephen Rodrick Being a girl dad has its problems, especially when your daughter thinks you’re a prick. As “I Sing Loud, You Sing Louder” begins, a teenage girl shoots a jaundiced look at her father who is driving her somewhere in the desolate West. She can’t hear him because her headphones are blaring “I’m Yer Dad,” a not even remotely subtle noise pop song by Grlwood that includes the lyric, “Feed me food while I watch sports / In my man cave made for sports / Whores in my porn, porn in my sports … ’Cause I’m your dad.” Dad studies her without comprehension. She is his daughter, but she is an undiscovered country to him. He vacated his fatherly duties during his booze years, and now he must deal with an estranged beautiful daughter whose heart stopped beating last night during an overdose. He pulls his pickup to the side of the road so she can pee, but she bolts, sprinting into the desert before he eventually catches her. He asks here where she was going with nothing but an endless moonscape for miles. She admits she didn’t have a plan. He looks at her and calls her by a childhood nickname.

There’s a fine line between stylized direction and direction that is so fussy that it gets in the way of a film’s actors. Unfortunately for Emma Westenberg’s directorial debut, “You Sing Loud, I Sing Louder,” that’s a line she does not navigate successfully.

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.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Assel Aushakimova’s dark comedy about journalism in Kazakhstan “Bikechess” has won the Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s Works in Progress award, which runs as part of the festival’s industry section, Eastern Promises. The section is focused on feature film projects from Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and North Africa. The Kazakh film follows Dina, who works as a journalist for the national television station. The stories she is asked to report on are becoming increasingly absurd and full of praise for the government. Her love life is limited to a few secret meetings with her married camera­man. Dina looks after her young sis­ter, a lesbian activist, who regularly finds herself in trouble with the au­thorities.

Ewan McGregor has said he used to show his kids the “worst toilet in Scotland” scene from Trainspotting.The actor, who had his breakthrough role as drug addict Mark Renton in the 1996 film, discussed introducing his children to his filmography at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.Speaking to press at the festival (via Variety), where he was joined by his daughter Clara, McGregor said: “I wasn’t there when Clara watched Trainspotting for the first time. But I did used to show my kids the toilet scene. Just for a laugh.

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.

Marta Balaga Forget “Star Wars” – Ewan McGregor preferred to show his kids another one of his films. “I wasn’t there when [my daughter] Clara watched ‘Trainspotting’ for the first time. But I did used to show my kids ‘the toilet scene.’ Just for a laugh. It’s a unique situation, perhaps, for a father to be able to show his children footage of him going down the toilet,” he said at Karlovy Vary Film Festival. The trauma didn’t stop there. “I have a memory of showing Clara ‘Moulin Rouge!,’ however. I think she was 9 years old. I put it on, and then I hear this wailing and crying. I rushed in, asking if I should switch it off and she went: ‘Noooo’!”

Ewan McGregor is opening up about his new look.

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.

Russell Crowe has had it with all those questions about “Gladiator 2”.

Alicia Vikander got the support of her husband Michael Fassbender while being honored at the 2023 Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

Will Tizard Contributor From indoor ice skating feats to Russell Crowe rocking the crowd, the 57th edition of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival has launched with all its unconventional charisma intact. Audiences who had to weather a downpour clearly showed no signs of dampened spirits as they cheered the fest’s opening gala dancers on ice skates, then rose to their feet to applaud guests Crowe and Alicia Vikander, both of whom accepted honors for their robust range of film work. Vikander, in accepting the award of fest president Jiri Bartoska, said she was moved to be celebrated in the Czech Republic, where her international career first took off with the 2012 shoot of “A Royal Affair.”

As tensions rise in Hollywood over an imminent update on SAG-AFTRA’s negotiations with the studios, thousands of miles east, the Czech spa town of Karlovy Vary is gearing up for its annual influx of industry insiders, curious film fans, and stars.

BET Awards promised a non-stop party paying tribute to the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, and they delivered!«We have an incredible lineup of performers who will take us on a musical journey, covering Hip Hop spanning every decade, style, and region,» said Connie Orlando, BET EVP, Specials, Music Programming & Music Strategy, ahead of the night in a press release. «From music to dance and fashion, we are digging through every crate as we celebrate 50 years of Hip-Hop and its diversity, evolution, and global impact.»«This wall-to-wall party will reverberate with the amazing energy and passion these artists bring to the stage and the culture,» she continued.