—Věra Chytilová Compared to the cultured arrogance of other big festivals and their catwalks of polite hypocrisy, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is a quasi-communal affair. Almost everyone and everything is genuinely welcoming, from the Russian-owned thermal town to the festival staff. People can take advantage of a convenient bike rental service to reach out-of-the-way venues, and all screenings and other festival areas are accessible to visitors on wheelchairs. A jovial and unassuming atmosphere prevails at the festival where sundry audiences meet rather than parade, and an unadulterated enthusiasm for cinema fills lines, theaters, and conversations. The branding strategy of the festival reflects this unimposing yet effulgent approach to cultural production and exhibition. The minimalist festival logo unequivocally states the age and cultural tonnage of an event eager to avoid putting non-initiates off, accompanied by a self-ironic campaign featuring past KVIFF Lifetime Achievement award-winners.
Made in Ash Inaugurated in the early Nineties after the fall of Communism, the East of the West competition epitomizes the regional expertise associated with the festival: Eastern European cinema. “We figured that if we wanted to stand out and be distinguishable we should focus on what we’re known for,” Karel Och, KVIFF’s artistic director, said of the growing relevance of the sidebar competition. As far as its geopolitical vocation is concerned, Och observes that the East of the West section “used to have a more political inference—they were films coming from the former Soviet Bloc” while now “we’re trying to shift the focus to the territorial, as we feel that this political undertone is no longer relevant.” There was in fact a tension across this year’s selection, as if a forward surge pushing away from the gloomy past was met by the necessity of dissecting its ghosts. A number of films in East of the West dealt, directly or indirectly, with the burdensome corpse of Soviet hegemony and, less critically so, with the unexpected harshness of neo-liberal fundamentalism.
The cinematic ramifications of this shared preoccupation varied from the reactionary and pitiable tones of Yuma (Piotr Mularuk, Poland) to the fertile contradictions of Dear Betrayed Friends (Sára Cserhalmi, Hungary). Thankfully historical oblivion is not an option for contemporary Eastern European cinema, but there seems to be a lack of balance when past and present are explored. While the nightmare of Communism’s official vision is minutely dissected and criticized, the colorful illusions of Consumer Democracy and its horrors are mostly condoned. It is as if, overwhelmed by two consecutive failures and, most significantly, by the betrayed promises of the free world, Eastern European cinema is unable to frame the current causes of its social malaise. Jury member and Czech film critic Jaromír Blažejovský remarked in a recent article how “films expressing disillusion with capitalism are not usually welcome in the Czech lands—critics respond to them with irritation and audiences do not flock there.”
Flower Buds The film that best captures this dead-end sensation is Flower Buds (Zdeněk Jiráský, Czech Republic), a motionless tale of repeated failure besieged by a claustrophobic absence of horizons. Allegorically crossed by a railway track that doesn’t take anyone anywhere, the film conveys the monotonous circularity of provincial life trapped in misery and hopelessness. Confined in a cabin by a railroad crossing where he works, Jarda, a family man obsessed with gambling and bottled miniature ships, opposes the rush of oncoming trains with his still resignation. Everything and everyone around him, in a town that significantly remains unnamed throughout the film, is mired in the same, seemingly inevitable existential apathy. Jarda’s introvert son falls in love with a local stripper and ends up buying off her criminal boss (after having sold the grass he had been cultivating with a friend). Social relations are a tired and opportunistic ritual guided by no principle, ideal, or feeling. What strikes deepest about this unsentimental piece of livid realism is the implosion of any sort of generational clash; the old and new generations face the same absence of prospects with the same dispirited attitude.
Made in Ash (Iveta Grófová, Slovak Republic) is another unflinching piece of crude realism following two Slovak girls on their way to neighboring Czech Republic in search of a less miserable life. There is no fortune to be made, only racism to be encountered, humiliations to collect, and the eventual sale of their bodies to be silently accepted. While their arc may be predictable, the film excels at avoiding sentimental extortion and steers clear of the clichés of melodrama. Its credible story of misery is all the more painful for its sadly ineluctable banality. On a similar but definitely feebler note is People Out There (Aik Karapetian, Latvia); this time, the protagonists are two young men trapped in a cheerless housing block in an anonymous post-Soviet suburb. Though dreaming of an improbable escape, the two friends passively undergo the squalor of their daily lives, their sole distraction being the occasional outbreak of violence.
Back in the days when there was no Facebook, it was the secret police that meticulously tracked people’s tastes, opinions, and ideas, as seen in The Exam (Péter Bergendy, Hungary). This stylish period thriller plunges deep into the labyrinth of ubiquitous paranoia but, unlike the The Lives of Others, offers neither redemption nor a post-Communist conclusion. A young agent is tested by his superiors in the wake of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, when order and compliance had to be reinstated by any means necessary. With the same austere composure of a secret police officer, Bergendy investigates the deadly grip of mutual mistrust and the way it erodes the communal basis of society. The Exam shows how a totalitarian regime thrives on the intimidating projection of its supposed omnipotence rather than its actual implementation and how fear remains the best social unifier.
Dear Betrayed Friends Dear Betrayed Friends tackles the same subject but deals with its aftermath and the aching ethical complexity that lingers after walls come down and “freedom” triumphs. Andor, a man in his sixties, decides to consult the files the secret police kept on him under Communism, which are now available at the national archives. To his bitter surprise he discovers that his friend János had spied on him in order to successfully continue publishing, while Andor had to struggle through menial and unstable occupations though he too, we learn, wanted to be a writer. Immediately Andor starts tailing and harassing the man whom he thought had been a friend, publicly naming and shaming him. János openly admits his vileness only to point out that while he had been “forced” to do what he did, nobody forced his betrayed friend Andor to pillory him. The elegant strength of this film consists in plainly exposing the lacerating moral litigation among these dearly betrayed friends without absolving or condemning any of them.
In comparison to the creative irreverence and insubordinate symbolism Czechoslovak cinema displayed almost half a century ago, freedom of expression and democracy have not much helped new generations finding their own voice or style. Digitally restored for its 50th anniversary, The Sun in a Net (Štefan Uher, Czechoslovakia) contains the seeds of what would later bloom into one of the most original and liberating new waves of Sixties cinema. The centrality of youth, its existential demands, and the restless longing for something different are all encapsulated in this early Nová Vlna “manifesto.” Though seemingly trapped by the tedium of existence, the two young protagonists are clearly animated by a stubborn faith in what the future might hold for them. The film’s sparse, rarefied air at times has an almost Antonioni-esque quality, but unlike the emotional deserts of the Italian master, relations here are still touched by a sense of possibility and meaning.
The Sun in a Net Another restored wonder was Milos Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball (67), in which the director affectionately deconstructs the inner workings of “socialist” rule through a behavioral diagnosis of its ossified procedures, epitomized by the grotesque staging of communality. It is the intrinsic comicality of indoctrination that indicts the stern regime rather than declarations about civil liberties and other democratic illusions. Against the grey artifice of a failed utopia, the film rescues the glimmer of resistance from the dark waters of compliance and reclaims the inalienable right to imagination. It is significant that Forman’s work in the U.S. rarely boasts quite the same expressive insolence, as if the awareness of unfreedom was more stimulating than the statuary illusion of liberty.
title: “Festivals Karlovy Vary” ShowToc: true date: “2024-05-27” author: “Donald Pitts”
The Notebook When it came to the films, the main competition presented a mixed bag. Disappointingly few entries pushed the envelope, particularly in narrative terms, and most of the attempts at social comment were trite. The latter weakness marked two of the top award winners, both from Eastern Europe. Hungarian film and stage director János Szász received the festival’s Grand Prix for The Notebook, an adaptation of Agota Kristof’s bestselling World War II novel, told from the perspective of 13-year-old twins living in an unnamed Eastern European country. Sent to live with their tyrannical grandmother and witnessing nothing but hate and violence in the world, they decide to expunge all their emotions through severe physical and psychological self-training as a means of surviving the horror that surrounds them. The film has grandiose allegorical aspirations, withholding characters’ given names and nationalities (apart from the Nazis) and offering the twins as emblematic of the postwar generation. But the symbolism is heavy-handed, and the story overuses tropes to the point of banality. The cinematography by Michael Haneke’s regular DP Christian Berger, however, is superb, and the beautifully expressive lighting supplies much-needed nuance.
Honeymoon Jan Hřebejk won the Best Director award with Honeymoon, the only Czech film in competition. An intruder crashes a wedding reception claiming to be an old schoolmate of the groom. Unconvincingly, considering his awkwardly hostile conduct, he is allowed to stay. After antagonizing the entire reception, he reveals that he has come to seek revenge for the brutal sexual abuse suffered by his boyfriend at the hands of the groom and his friends at school. Here too the story serves a bluntly metaphorical function: the men attended an elite art school where the children of the rich and powerful were awarded high grades and faced no repercussions for their actions, whereas those accepted on artistic merit alone were left to fend for themselves. Unelaborated, the film’s routine commentary on the Communist legacy of corruption and oppression fails to strike a chord, and as an indictment of homophobia, it’s even less successful.
XL Chauvinism and corruption received a far more expressive lashing in Marteinn Þórsson’s XL, which articulates the widespread outrage against the political elite sparked by the Icelandic economic crisis while simultaneously providing a scathing condemnation of Nordic drinking culture. After videos of his latest drunken brawl find their way online, a high-ranking politician and hopeless alcoholic named Leifur is forced by the prime minister to check into rehab to placate the public. Resentful of being sent to a state clinic while the rest of his colleagues (including the PM) got to do their penance at cushy luxury clinics, he spends the next 24 hours indulging in every vice he can before his enforced detox. The film sticks to Leifur’s perspective, with heavy use of POV camerawork and lens distortion effects. Together with the highly elliptical narrative, which jumps back and forth in time and mixes real and imagined events, XL very effectively simulates the disorientation of a permanently intoxicated mind. Ólafur Ólafsson, who received the Best Actor award for his performance, plays the rampaging Leifur with magnetic brio—a reprehensible and thoroughly pitiable character, stuck emptily chasing extremes.
A Field in England Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, winner of the Special Jury Prize, was the boldest film in competition and also the most exhilarating. By far Wheatley’s most experimental work to date, it constitutes one of those felicitous instances in which a talented director is given a relatively small budget and free rein, resulting in a wildly inventive film bursting with contagious energy. The action takes place entirely on the titular field during the English Civil War and involves four deserters forced by an evil alchemist to search for an occult treasure. Cursed, tortured, and fed psychotropic mushrooms, they find their search spiraling into a nightmare hallucination that ends up costing them a lot more than just their sanity. In a manner reminiscent of Ken Russell at his best, Wheatley comes out with guns blazing, indulging in extreme slow-motion, stroboscopic editing, hyperactive use of zoom, doomsday visions rendered in CGI, bewildering tableaux vivants, and countless other whims to glorious results. The film’s gorgeous monochrome aesthetic invests the scenery with an epic quality rarely bestowed upon the British countryside and rather than sap the vitality of the psychedelic images, these gain a timelessness that situates the story as much in 17th-century England as in purgatory or the post-apocalypse. Screened late in the festival, Wheatley’s film came as a most welcome breath of fresh air.
The Arbiter The festival’s East of the West sidebar generally fell short of its reputation as a treasure trove of budding Central and Eastern European filmmaking talent. One exception was the sophomore feature by Estonian provocatrice Kadri Kõusaar, The Arbiter, a pitch-black social satire that despite its flaws stood out for its ambition and vigor. Employing a premise similar to Wheatley’s Sightseers, the film follows a meek Cambridge academic as he sets off on a mission to wipe out the “useless and parasitic” in society—a definition that extends from child molesters to the mentally disabled—after his girlfriend has an abortion and he loses his research job. Strong production values, controlled camerawork, and an evocatively muted color palette generate a sinister atmosphere that couples nicely with the escalation of the protagonist’s insanity. After a captivating first half, however, tonal consistency is increasingly sacrificed for the sake of provocation, weakening the satire.
Miracle Finally, Miracle by Slovak director Juraj Lehotský begins firmly planted in familiar bleak-realism territory but distinguishes itself through its impressive lead, Michaela Bendulová, a nonprofessional discovered at a reformatory for adolescent girls like the one that serves as the film’s central setting. Brought there by her family, 15-year-old Ela (Bendulová) breaks out to rejoin her boyfriend, an addict twice her age who lives in a garage. Although she is pregnant with his child, he subjects her to increasing abuse and misery, culminating in his attempt to sell her to pimps to repay his drug debts. Left no alternative, Ela returns to the center, and the film’s strongest scenes show her caring for terminal patients at a hospital as part of her re-education. Here Bendulova truly shines as Ela’s desperate yearning for kindness and affection is finally requited, her quiet, loving care of a dying man bringing into stark perspective the promising new life she carries within.
title: “Festivals Karlovy Vary” ShowToc: true date: “2024-04-20” author: “Helen Krenz”
—Eva Zaoralová
Film Spa It’s with this sardonic epitaph in the documentary Film Spa that a former artistic director of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (from 1994 to 2010) jokingly describes the epochal shifts since its beginnings. Produced to celebrate the festival’s 50th anniversary, Miroslav Janek’s inevitably hagiographic film gives an agreeable account of its history complete with footage of famous guests and soothing sights. KVIFF, or Karlovy Vary as it’s usually called, was founded in 1946 as a non-competitive exhibition of films in Marienbad with joint screenings held in its current location, a high-end thermal resort, where the festival was permanently moved when the Communists came to power two years later, quickly becoming one of the regime’s cultural mouthpieces. In 1956, the International Federation of Film Producers Associations upgraded Karlovy Vary to a “category A” festival, and after 1959, with the launch of the Moscow film festival and the consequent decision to hold only one “category A” festival a year within the Eastern Bloc, it was held in alternate years until 1993. The years leading up to the Soviet “normalization” of Czechoslovakia in 1968 saw the festival becoming a veritable “Cannes de l’est,” with international stars flocking to the well-appointed spa town. From Frank Capra to Claudia Cardinale, Emmanuelle Riva to Henry Fonda, the festival opened its doors to glamour while pursuing its stated goal of “peace among nations” and the “new man.” Karlovy Vary also stood out for innovations including an early incarnation of video-blogging, in the daily series of ironic recorded “moments” hosted by Miroslav Hornicek that staged amusing vignettes of festival life. It was the first festival to publish a daily, edited in multiple languages and packaged in the sublime graphic design of the time. Filing for FILM COMMENT in 1962, Edith Laurie enthusiastically celebrated the communal spirit of the festival, observing how “this intimacy among the festival visitors produces the kind of inbreeding unknown at a big-city festival like Berlin, at a chichi-resort festival like Cannes, or at a tourist-center festival like Venice.” Laurie went on to praise the fact that in Karlovy Vary “the differences between Big and Little countries are minimal,” and that upon leaving the festival, “you have to be deaf in both ears NOT to know about film production in Bulgaria and Algeria and the Congo.” As Russian tanks entered Prague in the spring of 1968, clouds gathered in the sky over Karlovy Vary which, if you believe the archive footage in Film Spa, wouldn’t see a single ray of sun until 1990. With democracy, the sun returned, as the flags of non-aligned nations were swiftly replaced by advertising. Somewhat paradoxically though, the best films seen in Karlovy Vary this year all hailed from the dark Communist past, be they Czechoslovakian oldies or Soviet ones as in the case of Larisa Shepitko, to whom the festival dedicated a retrospective. In compliance with the resurgent wave of russophobia in Europe, especially deep-seated in the Czech Republic, the KVIFF website described Shepitko as a director of Ukrainian-Iranian origins (which is a little like calling Obama a politician of Hawaiian-Kenyan origins…). Though admittedly at odds with the ideological ossification that characterized the Soviet Union by then, her work proves that artistic nuance existed even within what is often depicted as a monolithic, wholly illiberal reality.
Wings Shepitko’s four features are transcendental meditations on the fracture between the enforced dream of a collectivized being and the fragile finitude of the individual beset by existential qualms. Whether dealing with the disappointment of a war hero oppressed by the meaningless glory bestowed upon her in Wings (66) or the regrets of a doctor who chose conveniences over challenges in You and I (71), the director’s work portrays the absence of a common ground on which the public and the private could dialectically converse. Her schismatic poetic stance coalesces with near perfection in The Ascent (77), which was apparently loathed by Soviet censors but won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. The film, the last Shepitko would complete before dying in a car accident, is set during the Second World War in the extreme subzero freeze of the Belorussian winter. Two partisans are caught by the Germans and their collaborators; sentenced to death along with two other culpable innocents, they have to face the verdict of their own conscience. An epic of war and resistance purged of the testosterone-powered clichés that come with the genre, The Ascent sublimates the heroic Soviet opposition against the Nazis into a celestial parable of spiritual minimalism. Strength and determination emanate from the very moral core of the protagonist, a Christ-like figure who doesn’t fit the usual mold of the war hero. Historically open to films from across the globe, the focus of Karlovy Vary has always been Eastern and Southeastern Europe, though the most notable films from those regions have typically been “discovered” or co-opted by other festivals first. Such was the case with the Czech New Wave in the Sixties as it was more recently with the films coming from Romania for instance. In its recent incarnations, the festival seems to have functioned more as a showcase than a launching pad for new talents, or, as a veteran Czech film critic sarcastically puts it in Film Spa, the place where people who didn’t get invited to other, more prestigious festivals end up. But bringing new and old films to local audiences and professionals alike remains a very honorable mission and, judging from the very young age of the average festivalgoer in Karlovy Vary, one that still makes a lot of sense. KVIFF is a very much felt and celebrated affair in the region, and if it’s not on the hot list of “cool” festivals, that’s not for lack of trying or due to some innate provincialism. Still, if major film festivals fail to fill their lineups with films that demand to be seen, it’s not difficult to imagine how daunting the programmers’ task can be in a festival like Karlovy Vary, something the official competition incontrovertibly showed. Though films of a certain peripheral interest were present, as far as your correspondent is concerned there were no exceptional titles that long-term memory will preserve. Winner of the Crystal Globe, the festival’s highest award, Bob and the Trees by French-born Diego Ongaro features a charismatic performance by its main protagonist, but the script wears thin as the film unfolds. Bob is an American logger, the old-fashioned kind, not too keen on branding his business but able to sense the way in which the natural environment around him is changing. A series of ambiguous misfortunes hit plucky Bob, his land, and his cow. Caught between slightly paranoid suspicions and a monomaniacal determination to solve it all by himself, Bob drives off to the strains of “Point of No Return” by Immortal Technique, into an unknown future. Bob Tarasuk, playing himself, delivers an engaging performance but he’s failed by a narrative shell that ill fits its leading character.
Those Who Fall Have Wings Very much like its protagonist, Bob and the Trees is an earthbound film pretending not to be something other than itself. The same does not apply to the Special Jury Prize winner Those Who Fall Have Wings by Austrian filmmaker Peter Brunner. Able to create images of sinister cogency, the director sets himself a rather challenging task: to explore the ways in which one comes to terms with death. The film follows two sisters, Kati and Pia, who spend their days at their grandma’s isolated country house besieged by a sinister sense of claustrophobia. Despite their grandmother’s ostensibly reassuring words, the menace doesn’t fade away. Death is the invisible and unspoken protagonist of a film that can’t stand up to the poetic challenge it sets itself. The very subject is not the easiest of endeavors for any director, and it’s unclear whether the overall indeterminacy and confusion of the film is intentional or stems from an inability to handle such complex subject matter. Inadequate expression coupled with disproportionate ambition was a recurring feature in the films in competition. It was to be found in The Red Spider, a beautifully shot reconstruction of Poland’s most infamous serial killer that was devoid of any penetrating quality beyond its polished surface. Likewise, in Song of Songs, the beautiful cinematography lays out in faithful detail a Jewish shtetl at the beginning of the 20th century but can’t conceal the film’s discomfiting narrative void. It’s still a significant film, considering its country of origin, Ukraine, where the new, Western-backed government has been naming streets after Nazi collaborators. Rather than individual “failures,” what these films represent is the general incapacity in contemporary European cinema to give a coherent shape to the complexity of feelings, intuitions, and impressions we experience and the wider context from which they originate. As if the chaotic world in which we live, love, struggle and suffer, watch and make films, required a new language we still haven’t mastered, or can’t even comprehend yet.
