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    43rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2008

    By Ron Holloway | August 11, 2008

    One glance at the lineups of the top A-category competition film festivals, and you can rate and measure – even criticize – them for their respective portfolios carried proudly on their backs. Cannes is honored as an authentic “auteur festival,” respected each May for discovering new directorial talent while furthering the careers of past auteur directors even when they are evidently over the hill. Venice, praised as a “director’s haven,” scores among veteran festivaliers as a laid-back September rendezvous for cult directors at the end of summer, a must for cineastes. Berlin likes to promote its “Hollywood image,” using its February dates to book as many box-office hits of the previous Christmas season as slots will allow, knowing full well that LA producers easily benefit from a Berlinale festival launch before their films hit the lucrative German screens. So what is Karlovy Vary best known for?

    Scheduled in early July, the 43rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (4-12 July 2008), under the dual leadership of Jiri Bartoska (president) and Eva Zaoralova (artistic director), has developed in recent years into a unique “platform for independents,” a summer festival in a renown spa that is particularly proud of its links to Sundance and Tribeca in the United States, Sochi in Russia, and Pusan in Korea. Indeed, for young Czech and Slovak backpackers pilgering annually to KVIFF, the core of the festival fare has always been the popular Forum of Independents section, programmed for over a decade by Stefan Ulrik, a Czech TV reporter. Ulrik also gained some renown as a founding member of the roving “Festival Band” – aka “Three Stefans” (Stefan Ulrik of Karlovy Vary, Stefan Kitanov of Sofia, Stefan Laudyn of Warsaw ) – whose annual concerts at Karlovy Vary run into the wee hours of the morning. This year was no exception.

    One glance at past Crystal Globe (KVIFF’s Grand Prix) winners also underscores how valuable the Forum of Independents has been to the festival image. In 2006, Karlovy Vary hit paydirt by inviting the Sundance Film Festival to present award winners, both features and documentaries, from its festival archive. This tip-of-the hat paid off on awards night, when Laurie Collyer’s Sherrybaby (USA), the hit of the Sundance festival that January, was awarded the Crystal Globe, while the film’s lead actress, Maggie Gyllenhaal, received the prize for Best Actress. As much heart rending melodrama as hard-hitting documentary, Sherrybaby chronicled the efforts of a young mother to win back the affections of her little daughter upon being released from prison for drug abuse.

    This year, KVIFF invited Amy Redford to present her debut feature The Guitar (USA) in the competition. The story of a young woman coming to grips with terminal cancer by teaching herself to play on the electric guitar, The Guitar had premiered last January at Sundance, the festival founded by her father Robert Redford. A hit at Sundance, the film features a standout performance by Saffran Burrows as the afflicted woman who discovers a strength she barely knew she could draw upon.

    Tact and Taste

    Ask visiting independent directors why they prefer Karlovy Vary, and the response usually boils down to two indefinable elements that allows this festival to stand head and shoulders over many of its competitors. “Tact and taste,” as one Karlovy Vary insider put it. The Karlovy Vary website – www.kviff.com – tells most of the story. Packed with everything relevant from a photo gallery to a play video, from its Festival Daily (in Czech and English) to statistical information (10,872 accredited participants, 143,781 tickets sold, 477 screenings), it even has slots for hot tips and registration for its website newsletter. Altogether, 29 festival guests are listed on the website, each spotlighted with career details to help gun-slinging bloggers to keep the record straight. Among this year’s honored Yankee guests were Robert De Niro (Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened), Les Blank (five-documentary retrospective tribute), Paul Mazursky (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, 1969 New Hollywood classic), John Sayles (Honeydripper), Tom McCarthy (The Visitor), Danny Glover and Melonie Diaz (both in Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind). Something like a rollcall of American Indies.

    Complementing the website, and just as important for cineastes and historians, the 43rd KVIFF catalogue, running 328 pages, offers accurate information on films and directors invited to the festival, focusing in particular on biographies of independent directors who have visited Karlovy Vary in the past. Thanks to a team of perceptive scouts, Karlovy Vary has boosted its image abroad as a festival set on discovering talent at its source.

    Julietta Sichel, KVIFF program director, is a regular visitor each October at the Pusan Film Festival, deemed by many festivaliers as the world’s top showcase of Asian cinema. This year, she brought back from Pusan Kim Byung-woo’s Written (Korea). A film within a film within a film, Written plumbs the intellectual depths of screenwriting by having a film character confront the actor selected to play him in the preproduction stage. Programmed in the Forum of Independents, it was awarded the Netpac (Network for Promotion of Asian Cinema) Prize.

    Awarded the runnerup Special Jury Prize in the KVIFF competition, Nan Treveni Achnas’s The Photograph (Indonesia) was six years in the making from project to release – finally brought to completion thanks to coproduction partners in France, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden. The story of an aged Jakarta photographer who befriends a young prostitute, his family secret is gradually revealed to the unexpected guest via antiquated photographs harbored in the old man’s studio. A talented woman director in Indonesian cinema, Nan Treveni Achnas’s Pasir berbisik (Whispering Sands) (Indonesia/Japan, 2001) had previously been invited to the 2002 KVIFF in the Another View section. The story of an impoverished Indonesian family trying to survive as refugees on a desert landscape, Whispering Sands established Achnas as a director with an affinity for the plight of outsiders.

    KVIFF scout Galina Kopanova regularly visits the Sochi Open Russian Film Festival. Among the half-dozen Sochi films booked this year by Karlovy Vary was Alexei Uchitel’s Plennyj (Captive), programmed in the competition and awarded Best Director. Captive scores as a rarity in Russian cinema: a forthright inquiry into the pain inflicted by the Russian military upon innocent bystanders during the Chechen war. When a young villager is enlisted by trapped Russian soldiers in a mountainous terrain to help lead the convoy to safety, two soldiers, a hardened veteran and a young recruit, accompany the young man through the lines. The trio gradually confront their own misgivings in a conflict they barely understand.

    The prestigious East of the West Prize, awarded by a separate international jury to the best film from Central and Eastern European countries, went to Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan (Kazakhstan), a coproduction with Russia, Poland, Germany, and Switzerland. Set in the steppes of Kazakhstan, Tulpan confirms Sergei Dvortsevoy as an adept film poet, a director who draws his inspiration from simple situations in real life. Preferring nonprofessionals over actors, he is able to create a world of laughter and tears that anyone in the audience can relate to. Tulpan, whose face we never see in the film, is courted by Asa, who has just returned as a self styled hero in the naval military and now seeks independence as a shepherd with his own yurt. The courtship is stymied, however, when the suitor learns that his ears happen to be too big – yet, as it turns out, there are other ways to prove his manhood. Awarded the Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes, Tulpan was also voted a share of the Netpac Prize at Karlovy Vary. Thanks to this remarkable feature film debut, Sergei Dvortsevoy already ranks as a leading independent director in Central Asia.

    Czech Independents

    Czech Independents also benefitted from KVIFF largesse. In 2002, the Crystal Globe was awarded to the Czech entry that had opened the festival: Petr Zelenka’s lively mock-documentary Rok d’abla (The Year of the Devil), a fake account of a popular rock singer-songwriter with his band on a make-believe tour across the country as funeral musicians. A gifted playwright as well as innovative filmmaker, Petr Zelenka is one of the key figures in the current (second) Czech new wave of independent filmmakers that began in the mid-1990s and continues unabated until the present day. Known across the breath of eastern Europe, his play Pribelhy obycenjeho silenstvi (Tales of Common Insanity) – adapted to the screen under the English title Wrong Side Up (2005) – ran for a year in a Prague theater and was a stage hit as well in Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia.

    Zelenka returned to Karlovy Vary this year with Karamazovi (The Karamazovs), a screen version of the classic stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov by the late writer-director Evald Schorm (1931-1988), an uncompromising leader of the first Czech new wave of the 1960s. Staged in Poland in the rundown Nova Huta steelmill near Cracow, and conceived within the context of rehearsals for a performance at an alternative drama festival, The Karamazovs features Zelenka’s own stage ensemble in a production that mirrors Dostoyevsky’s moral conflicts among the actors themselves and ends on a tragic note among the steelmill spectators. Awarded the FIPRESCI Critics Prize, The Karamazovs deserved more. For my taste, it was the one memorable film in the competition that deserves an extended life on the festival circuit and in arthouse release.

    Michaela Pavlatova’s Deti noci (Night Owls), the other Czech film in the competition, is set during the night shift at a 24-hour convenience store. It features a couple of neighborhood oddballs in absurd situations rather common to the Karlin district in Prague. Although burdened by a thin scenario, the smattering of quaint gags in Night Owls did merit for Martha Issova and Jiri Madl back-to-back awards for Best Actors. Ofka (Martha Issova) is not quite sure if she’s ready to leave childhood to grow up. Her boyfriend Ubr (Jiri Madl), her street companion with a fascination for garbage cans, is hopelessly in love with her. That’s about it, plot wise. Better known as a Czech animation director, Michaela Pavlatova’s Reci, reci, reci (Words, Words, Words) (1999) received an Oscar Nomination. From there she moved on to documentary filmmaking and is now a feature film talent worth keeping an eye on.

    Another standout in the Czech Films 2007-2008 series, Pavel Koutecky and Miroslav Janek’s Obcan Havel (Citizen Havel) is one of those documentaries you want to see over again from the beginning. Compressed into a two-hour straightjacket, Citizen Havel is remarkable in many respects. An intimate, revealing, urbane documentary portrait of writer-playwright-politician Vaclav Havel, the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993-2003), the film was only possible due to a close friendship with documentary filmmaker Pavel Koutecky (1956-2006), who unfortunately died in a tragic accident before the film was edited. Completed in the postproduction stage by colleague Miroslav Janek, Citizen Havel covers the period from 1992, when Vaclav Havel was weighing his chances for a second presidential term, and ends in 2006, when circa 120 hours had already been shot on the life and times of the Czech Republic’s first citizen.

    Citizen Havel offers the viewer many insights into how the second-term president successfully out-maneuvered his parliamentary opponent, Vaclav Klaus (today the Czech president). Scenes from parliamentary headknocking are interspersed to add to the drama. Also, we visibly feel how his warm relationship with his first wife, Olga (1933-1996), who died of cancer, was then carried over to his second wife, Dagmar. Indeed, the women in Havel’s life play a key supportive role in his decision-making. Lastly, there are the prominent visitors who walk in and out of his open-door office: among others, Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Madeleine Albright, and the Rolling Stones, in addition to Czech and Slovak politicians and personalities. One scene underscores the easy-going atmosphere of the job. When Mick Jagger asks about a good restaurant, Vaclav Havel obliges him with a private tip.

    Film Noir

    The Crystal Globe was awarded to Henrik Ruben Genz’s Frygtelig lykkelig (Terribly Happy) (Denmark). Partly film noir, partly black comedy, with grotesque elements of the psycho-thriller and the lawless Western thrown in on the side, Terribly Happy comes across as a homage to American independent cinema. Based on a popular detective novel by Erling Jepsen with the same title, the twists in the story about a Copenhagen policeman punished with a disciplinary assignment to a provincial outpost are what make it a winner. Here in South Jutland, its landscape shot in eyecatching widescreen, the local gentry prefer vigilante justice over law by the book. So when a distressed woman seeks police help from her abusive husband, secrets come out of the closet, and the ensuing affair leads to grotesque encounters and the eventual showdown – in a bar, no less.

    A homage to David Lynch and the Coen Brothers? Or a tip of the hat to a similar cynical hardboiled detective tale – Three of a Kind by James M. Cain – adapted to the screen by Raymond Chandler into Double Indemnity (1944), directed by Billy Wilder? Probably both.

    For CentEast filmmakers are currently borrowing freely from American film noir classics. The name Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s alter ego, also pops up as an inside joke in Attila Gigor’s A nyomozo (The Investigator) (Hungary/Sweden/Ireland), awarded the FICC Film Clubs Prize. Why Philip Marlowe is easy to understand, but tricky to explain. In Attila Gigor’s debut feature The Investigator he leans heavily on film noir esthetics to tell the story of a middle-aged coroner, whose conscientious care for his invalid mother (dying of spine cancer) leads him to a contract killing to obtain the money for a possible survival operation in Sweden. However, once the foul deed has been committed, the man discovers that the victim might be his own unknown brother, which then turns the killer into an investigator to find out just who the victim really was in the first place. As a riddle to be unlocked, there’s a certain fascination of sitting through the film’s twists and turns over the two-hour stretch.

    In yet another stab at film noir aesthetics, Alexei Mizgirev’s Kremen (The Hard Hearted) (Russia) chronicles the moral downfall of a lad from the provinces, who, fresh out of the military, joins the corrupt police force in Moscow to prove how tough he is. In The Hard-Hearted the lad’s love for a girl from his hometown, now a university student, only hardens his feelings when she doesn’t return his affections. Similar to Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled detective tales, where the cops are usually numbered among the bad guys, the head-strong youth follows his own code of justice until the chips are finally down and a choice for life has to be made. According to Alexei Mizgirev, The Hard-Hearted mirrors conditions rather closely in today’s Moscow police force.

    Along the same lines, some CentEast women directors are raising moral questions without offering even a hint of solutions. In Kristina Buozyte’s debut feature Kolekcioniere (The Collectress) (Lithuania) a traumatized beauty decides to exorcise her aggressions with video experiments leaning towards the excess. With the help of an alcoholic video editor, her extreme behavior is used to entice and eventually seduce her sister’s fiancee. Although an exploitive tale without much rhyme or reason, The Collectress fascinates as a portrait of troubled youth in new Europe. Further, Kristina Buozyte found in Gabija Ryskuviene an attractive femme fatale with ice in her veins.

    Also, in Dorota Kedzierzawska’s Pora umierac (Time to Die) (Poland), a minimalist portrait shot in black-and-white about an old woman living out her last years in a rundown villa, the performance by 91-year-old Danuta Szalfarska, the grand lady of Polish cinema, breathes life into an otherwise typical tale of social disorder. As Time to Die unfolds, we sense the reasons why the woman feels she not all ready to kick the bucket. Strapped with an obese daughter, an goof-ball son, and a brat of a granddaughter, her only thought now is to save her beloved house from an avaricious family scheme and neer-do-well neighbors. “Time for mischief-making” might be a better title.

    A Reckoning With the Past

    “This year marks the 40th anniversary of a fundamental period in our country’s history,” stated artistic director Eva Zaoralova in the catalogue for the 43rd KVIFF. “The political trend exemplified by the Prague Spring attempted to make sure that Socialism possessed a ‘human face.’ We all know how it ended … they sent in the tanks.”

    So, this year, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Prague Spring, Czech director Ivan Passer (born 1933) was welcomed back from his American exile to serve as President of the International Jury. To mark the occasion, two of Ivan Passer’s classic Czech New Wave productions were programmed. Passer’s short feature Fadni odpoledne (A Boring Afternoon) (Czechoslovakia, 1964), an adaptation of a droll Bohumil Hrabel story, is set in a pub on a Sunday afternoon – tongue-in-cheek humor to tickle the funny-bone! And his legendary feature Intimni osvetleni (Intimate Lighting) still charms an improvised free-flowing feature about two musicians who meet for a casual weekend in a country cottage – nothing much happens, save that in the course of conversations one comically absurd situation tops another.

    In addition, tributes were paid to Slovak directors Juraj Jakubisko and Dusan Hanak (both born in 1938). The tribute to Juraj Jakubisko, a master of “magical realism,” was crowned with the world premiere of his long awaited Bathory production, a Slovak coproduction with the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Great Britain. Based loosely on the infamous life of Slovak Countess Elisabeth Bathory (1560-1614), who is said to have bathed in the blood of slain virgins to keep her beauty, the three part, 140-minute spectacle stars British actress Anna Friel in the title role. As much colorful fiction as historical fact (Italian painter Caravaggio is thrown in for fictitious pictorial effect), Bathory does have its moments when Jakubisko charges the story with some inventive visual gags to comment on the absurdities of an intriguing court.

    But what’s the point of the film? Was Bathory fighting to save Christian Europe from the invading Turks, while paying lip-service to Protestant and Catholic forces at the height of the Reformation? Who knows. But one thing is certain. Shot in English, with delays that extended the shooting schedule over nearly three years, the budget alone of $15 million makes Bathory the most expensive Czech and Slovak production ever made. But too bad KVIFF did not include Jakubisko’s legendary Zbehovia a putnici (Deserters and Fools) (Czechoslovakia, 1968), on the absurdities of war games, in the KVIFF tribute.

    Dusan Hanak, too, was honored with a memorable retrospective tribute. Gracing the walls leading to the terrace of the flagship Thermal Hotel was an exhibition of Hanak’s insightful photographs of faces and people in Africa and Latin America. Mostly taken after photographer-direction had finally gained permission to leave the country. Programmed in the Dusan Hanak retrospective were two films to remind us of how talented this suppressed filmmaker was at the height of his career.

    Hanak’s Obrazy stareho sveta (Pictures of the Old World) (Czechoslovakia, 1972), inspired by the work of Slovak photographer Martin Martincek, portrayed poor old people at the end of their lives. Immediately censored by the Communist government for its “ugly” representation of Slovak reality, Pictures of the Old World barely survived in the national film archives. Today it is ranked among one of the finest Slovak films made. His Ruzove sny (Rosy Dreams) (Czechoslovakia, 1976), on the surface an innocent tale about a love affair between a gypsy girl and a young postman, underscored at that time the fragile tolerance of gypsies in Slovak society.

    Standing ovations greeted Ivan Passer, Juraj Jakubisko, and Dusan Hanek when festival president Jiri Bartoska handed them Crystal Globes for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema.

    A Personal Footnote

    Forty years ago, while attending the 16th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (5-15 June 1968), I was writing for the Film Society Review, a New York film publication edited by Bill Starr out of a basement office at the Bleeker Street Cinema in Greenwich Village.

    Back then, the Karlovy Vary festival was held in the Grand Salle, the ballroom link between the Pupp Hotel and its adjacent Park Hotel. Overjoyed to participate in the lively atmosphere of the Prague Spring as it played out daily at the festival, I must admit that I wasn’t much impressed at the time by the “wry wit” in Jiri Menzel’s Rozmarne leto (Capricious Summer) (Czechoslovakia, 1967), his screen adaptation of Vladislav Vancura’s novel (published in 1926) that was awarded the Crystal Globe. Later, I changed my mind about that bucolic jaunt into the past. Capricious Summer, in retrospect, stands as one of Jiri Menzel’s best films – indeed, an insightful screen adaptation of a Czech literary classic brimming with parody and raucous humor. Set in a small town, the provincial routine of three middle-aged gentlemen (a bathhouse owner, a retired major, an abbé) is upset when a tightrope conjurer arrives in town with his pretty assistant. “The gentlemen chase after the girl, and the proprietor’s wife chases after the conjuror … except the illusions of life are stripped away,” I noted in my FSR critique. “Each of the friends is left with bitter-sweet memories of what life was and should continue to be, instead of what life is and cannot be changed. The performances (Rudolf Hrusinsky, Frantisek Rehak, Vlastimil Brodsky, Jiri Menzel as the conjurer) make this film exceptional.”

    By contrast, the Czechoslovak competition entry I liked better was Tri dcery (Three Daughters) (Czechoslovaia, 1967) by Stefan Uher, the Slovak director who helped launch the Czech New Wave with Slnko v sieti (Sunshine in the Net) (1962), inspired by French nouvelle vague aesthetics. “Three Daughers is a controlled film of unities, motifs, symbols, and form,” I wrote in FSR, “the King Lear theme about a rich landowner who loses his property and must fall back on his daughters. The reality of the situation lies not in the telling of the story so much as the film’s universal implications.”

    In my mini-review I must confess I dodged the socialist message of the film. At that time, “socialism with a human face” under Prime Minister Alexander Dubcek was on its way in. What this would precisely mean in a reworked Lear theme about an old landowner in prewar days who puts his three daughters in a convent to avoid paying for their dowries, then turning to them later for help after postwar communism robs him of his land under forced collectivization, was something beyond my political and intellectual reach.

    Instead, I wrote with some passion about the “main attraction” at the festival – that Open Forum in the regal Lazne I bathhouse. “The topic: artistic freedom. Or, to put it more precisely: the freedom to think freely. The discussion, for all practical purposes, was narrowed down to an intense dialogue between the Czechs, the Russians, and the East Germans. The outcome was a resolution, drafted by the majority of the delegates, that is something akin to the Bill of Rights. To back up their new-found freedom, the festival officials declared at the closing ceremonies that Karlovy Vary would henceforth operate separately from Moscow (formerly they alternated). The Czechs have an ancient and dignified film history. They want to keep it that way – without interference!” Forty years later, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is not just a “Platform for Independents” open to all comers. It’s also become a vital crossroads between East and West.

    Awards

    Crystal Globe – Grand Prix
    Frygtelig lykkelig (Terribly Happy) (Denmark), dir Henrik Ruben Genz
    Special Jury Prize
    The Photograph (Indonesia/France/Netherlands/Switzerland/Sweden), dir Nan Triveni Achnas
    Best Director
    Alexei Uchitel, Plennyj (Captive) (Russia/Bulgaria)
    Best Actress
    Martha Issova, Deti noci (Night Owls) (Czech Republic), dir Michaela Pavlatova
    Best Actor
    Jiri Madl, Deti noci (Night Owls) (Czech Republic), dir Michaela Pavlatova
    Special Mentions
    Karamazovi (The Karamazovs) (Czech Republic/Poland), dir Petr Zelenka
    A nyomozo (The Investigator) (Hungary/Sweden/Ireland), dir Attila Gigor

    Documentary Awards
    Best Documentary over 30 minutes
    Man on Wire (UK), dir James Marsh
    Special Jury Mention
    Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (USA), dir Christopher Bell
    Best Documentary under 30 minutes
    Letunt vilag (Lost World) (Hungary/Finland), dir Gyula Nemes

    East of the West Award
    Tulpan (Kazakhstan/Russia/Poland/Germany/Switzerland), dir Sergei Dvortsevoy Special Mention
    Shivachki (Seamstresses) (Bulgaria), dir Lyudmil Todorov

    FIPRESCI (International Critics) Award
    Karamazovi (The Karamazovs) (Czech Republic/Poland), dir Petr Zelenka

    Ecumenical Award
    The Photograph (Indonesia/France/Netherlands/Switzerland/Sweden), dir Nan Triveni Achnas

    FICC (Film Clubs) Award
    A nyomozo (The Investigator) (Hungary/Sweden/Ireland), dir Attila Gigor

    NETPAC (Network for Promotion of Asian Cinema) Award – ex aequo
    Written (South Korea), dir Kim Byung-woo – Forum of Independents
    Tulpan (Kazakhstan/Russia/Poland/Germany/Switzerland), dir Sergei Dvortsevoy – East of the West

    Independent Camera Award – Forum of Independents
    Rusalka (Mermaid) (Russia), Anna Melikyan

    Europa Cinemas Label
    Bahrtalo! – Jo szerencset! (Bahrtalo! – Good Luck!) (Hungary/Austria/Germany), dir Róbert Lakatos – East of the West

    Pravo Audience Award
    12 (Russia), dir Nikita Mikhalkov – Out of Competition

    Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema
    Robert De Niro (USA)
    Dusan Hanak (Slovakia)
    Juraj Jakubisko (Slovakia)
    Ivan Passer (USA)

    Festival President’s Award
    Danny Glover (USA)
    Christopher Lee (UK)

    Town of Karlovy Vary Award
    Armin Mueller-Stahl (Germany)

    – Ron Holloway

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