Vice News Debuts Trailer for ‘Scream of My Blood’ Ahead of Karlovy Vary Screening (EXCLUSIVE)

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The Locarno Film Festival, Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, Rotterdam”s IFFR and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival have joined forces in a new initiative called Launchpad which aims to nurture budding film professionals. The basic purpose of Launchpad is to facilitate the formative process of selected emerging film professionals working in international sales, marketing, traditional and online distribution, exhibition and programming, and funds and commissions. The idea is to give them facilitated access to a network of European film festivals spread throughout the yearly calendar.

A collection of European festivals including Locarno, Thessaloniki, Tallinn Black Nights, Rotterdam, and Karlovy Vary, have partnered to create a new network aimed at integrating film professionals.

Stephen Rodrick Some things are best in small doses. Cheesecake and Ketamine come to mind. The more-is-not-necessarily-better conundrum confronts the creators of “Scream of My Blood: A Gogol Bordello Story,” a Vice News documentary about the punk folk band Gogol Bordello and Eugene Hütz, the band’s charismatic lead singer. Hütz also doubles as a Ukrainian activist/raconteur/resident deep thinker. He can be a lot. Audiences’ appreciation of the doc will depend on their patience with Hütz, a man whose intentions are good even if his volume is always set to 11.  Directors Nate Pommer and Eric Weinrib have the difficult task of trying to explain a 24-year-old cult band in 99 minutes. It is very much an immigrant story. There’s an early shot of Hütz swaggering onstage with the band — a mélange of violinists, drummers and guitarists — and baptizing the audience with his beer.

Crystal Globe CompetitionJury members:Dora Bouchoucha, TunisiaPatricia Clarkson, USAJohn Nein, USAOlmo Omerzu, Czech Republic / SloveniaBarry Ward, IrelandGRAND PRIX – CRYSTAL GLOBE (25 000 USD)The financial award is shared equally by the director and producer of the award-winningfilm.“Blaga’s Lessons” (“Urotcite na Blaga”)Directed by: Stephan KomandarevBulgaria, Germany, 2023SPECIAL JURY PRIZE (15 000 USD)The financial award is shared equally by the director and producer of the award-winningfilm.“Empty Nets” (“Toorhaye khali”)Directed by: Behrooz KaramizadeGermany, Iran, 2023BEST DIRECTOR AWARDBabak Jalali for the film “Fremont”USA, 2023BEST ACTRESS AWARDEli Skorcheva for her role in the film “Blaga’s Lessons” (“Urotcite na Blaga”)Bulgaria, Germany, 2023BEST ACTOR AWARDHerbert Nordrum for his role in the film “The Hypnosis” (“Hypnosen”)Sweden, Norway, France, 2023SPECIAL JURY MENTION“Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano”Directed by: Cyril ArisGermany, Lebanon, 2023PRÁVO AUDIENCE AWARD“The Edge of the Blade” (“Une affaire d’honneur”Directed by: Vincent PerezFrance, 2023Proxima CompetitionJury Members:Dana Linssen, NetherlandsMarija Razgutė, LithuaniaŠimon Šafránek, Czech RepublicBarbara Wurm, AustriaMeng Xie, People’s Republic of ChinaPROXIMA GRAND PRIX (15 000 USD)The financial award is shared equally by the director and producer of the award-winningfilm.“Birth”Directed by: Yoo Ji-youngSouth Korea, 2022PROXIMA SPECIAL JURY PRIZE (10 000 USD)The financial award is shared equally by the director and producer of the award-winningfilm.“Guras”Directed by: Saurav RaiIndia, Nepal, 2023SPECIAL JURY MENTION“Brutal Heat” (“Brutální vedro”Directed by: Albert HospodářskýCzech Republic, Slovak Republic, 2023CRYSTAL GLOBE FOR OUTSTANDING

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Berlin- and Paris-based Salaud Morisset, a leading short film production and distribution outfit, has acquired two feature films for world sales – one selected by Karlovy Vary Film Festival and the other by Locarno Film Festival – as the company accelerates into feature film sales and production. Salaud Morisset has taken world sales rights on Cyril Aris’ feature documentary “Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano,” which premiered in the main competition at Karlovy Vary this week, and Una Gunjak’s fiction feature “Excursion,” just announced as the opener of Locarno Film Festival’s Filmmakers of the Present section. Salaud Morisset, which is also a co-producer on “Excursion,” aims to continue fostering synergies between its production and sales operations as it commits to a full slate of feature projects.

Will Tizard Contributor In Karlovy Vary Film Festival competition entry “We Have Never Been Modern,” Czech director Matej Chlupacek takes on both the dangers of Utopian bubbles and the power of unbending faith in traditional gender concepts. The story, set in a Slovak company town built by a visionary industrialist, takes place on the eve of World War II, as a murder mystery threatens to upset the idealized community. The factory director’s wife Helena, played by Eliska Krenkova, is an aspiring doctor who is soon to give birth. But her rosy future is suddenly darkened by the discovery of the body of a newborn intersex baby in the factory’s courtyard.

Norwegian cinema has been enjoying a moment lately, what with Joachim Trier’s crowdpleasing The Worst Person in the World pulling up to Drive My Car in the Oscar race and Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Me carving out a rep on the festival circuit. The Hypnosis, Ernst de Geer’s feature debut, sits somewhere between the two of them, fashioning a fitfully funny relationship drama that tilts at some very modern windmills (coaches, gurus, new-tech start-ups, workshops that involve blue-sky thinking) within a framework similar to Kristian Levring’s 2008 Danish drama Fear Me Not, in which a man’s personality changes after he becomes addicted to an experimental drug. The Hypnosis doesn’t quite follow that film’s melodramatic course, but there are similar thoughts raised about the human mind.

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. 

The BBC News channel has got a roasting from the corporation’s editorial standards board for giving what amounted to free advertising for Starbucks’ olive oil coffee drink.

“Reservation Dogs.” Season 3’s trailer may mark the end of an era for Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi’s dry comedy, but based on the video, this last season also marks the start of something new for its central characters.Since its premiere in 2021, “Reservation Dogs” has always been about the liminal space between childhood and adulthood. The series started with Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) forgoing his friends’ plan to ditch the reservation after his persistent Spirit (Dallas Goldtooth) persuaded him to improve his home rather than abandon it.

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.

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).

Will Tizard Contributor Spa town Karlovy Vary is known for more than healing waters to emerging filmmakers and producers from Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Those on track to reach global audiences are well acquainted with the festival’s industry section, headlined by the Eastern Promises collection of development and marketing workshops and mentorship programs. Aside from packed panels and talks by international veterans, such as the masterclass by indie mogul Christine Vachon of Killer Films, one of the industry program’s most buzzworthy events is the regionally focused Midpoint Institute Feature Launch. This year-round training platform took off more than a decade ago to support emerging talents by helping them to integrate their projects into the marketplace. It provides them with international collaboration and networking opportunities which, as Sona Morgenthalova, Feature Launch program coordinator for Midpoint, says, have proven highly effective.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The trailer has debuted for feature documentary “Dancing on the Edge of the Volcano,” which will have its world premiere in the Main Competition at Karlovy Vary Film Festival. Reynard Films is handling international sales. Cyril Aris’ film centers on the aftermath of the catastrophic explosion at the port of Beirut on Aug. 4, 2020, which leaves a large part of the Lebanese capital in ruins. In the midst of the chaos, a film crew face an overwhelming decision: to continue the production of their movie or abandon it? They are torn between their firm belief in the transformative power of cinema and a deep sense of cynicism about its ability to effect change in a nation plagued by economic turmoil and societal collapse.

Ed Meza @edmezavar Behrooz Karamizade’s Iranian drama “Empty Nets,” which has its international premiere in the Crystal Globe Competition at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, offers a sobering look at the increasingly difficult, sometimes hopeless lives of young working-class people in Iran as they strive for better lives. Set on Iran’s northern Caspian Sea coast, the film follows Amir (Hamid Reza Abbasi), a young man who, desperate to marry his girlfriend Narges (Sadif Asgari), seeks work at a local fishery with the hope of earning enough money for an appropriate dowry and winning over her upper-class parents. Once there, illicit opportunities present themselves and he is soon drawn into the dangerous but lucrative business of sturgeon poaching and the black market caviar trade.

Futurama!” The trailer has been released for Season 11 of the animated futuristic sitcom. After a decade, the series has defrosted for 10 new episodes which will be added to Hulu on July 24. Season 11 features “a whole new pandemic in town as the crew explores the future of vaccines, bitcoin, cancel culture, and streaming TV,” said the show’s official synopsis. New New York will feature the voices of John DiMaggio, Billy West, Katey Sagal, Tress MacNeille, Maurice LaMarche, Lauren Tom, Phil LaMarr and David Herman. “Futurama” was created by Matt Groening and is executive produced by Groening, Cohen, Ken Keeler and Claudia Katz.