After nine days of an intense film marathon between July 4th and 12th, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (best known by its acronym Kviff) drew to a close. We followed the action on site and at the coal face exclusively for you. I attended the event in its entirety, and was fortunate enough to count with an extra pair of hard-working hands and brain, with Lida Bach also providing coverage on site. Two further writers – H.M. Ryan and Andre Vital Pardue – offered some remote help.
Karlovy Vary is a charming spa town in the Czech region of Bohemia, roughly 90 minutes from Prague by car. The city is warm and extremely vibrant, with late-night events rocking the city every single day. The fresh air from the lush hills (Karlovy Vary is located in the valley of the Ohře River) helps to keep enthusiastic film-lovers cool. Czech audiences – in particular young people – descend to Karlovy Vary en masse in order ti see their favourite stars on the red carpet and to watch films from every corner of the planet. Literally every screening is sold out. This is no mean feat: not even Cannes and Venice manage to achieve this.
The history of the event is impressive, too. The Festival’s Artistic Director Karel Och explained to us in an exclusive interview that Kviff helped to catapult to fame names such as Ken Loach (this is where premiered his second film Kes, in 1969) and Philip Barantini (of Netflix series Adolescents). This is also where Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie premiered: the French film won the Crystal Globe and went on to become one of the most commercially successful non-English language movies in history
In total, we published and grand total of 59 pieces during the Festival. That’s 32 brand new and exclusive pieces (including all the films in the Crystal Globe Competition), as well as 27 republications (films that we originally viewed in other festivals). You can read our full coverage by clicking here. And don’t forget to check our interviews with Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, and Ukrainian helmer Sergei Loznitsa.
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The winners
The winners of the main prizes in the Crystal Globe Competition are listed below. In total, 12 films were vying for those prizes:
Various prizes were given to the films in the Proxima section, the festival’s second competitive strand. Films from other sections (which showcased originally in other festivals) do not adhere to Fiapf rules (which mandate either a world or an international premiere) and therefore they were not eligible for the main awards.
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Our dirty picks
Our favourite Crystal Globe Competition films mostly coincided with the biggest award winners. My personal favourites were indeed the Czech-Slovakian Crystal Globe winner Better Go Mad in the Wild, a lyrical piece of autofiction about twin hermits connecting with their animals and mortality, Catalonian drama When a River Becomes the Sea, a long, slow and profound drama about the ramifications of sexual abuse, and Norwegian blend of refugee drama and psychosexual thriller Don’t Call me Mama, about a devoted teacher falling in love with a very young asylum seeker from Syria.
Films outside the main Competition, and which also deserve special mention as well as unequivocal praise include Sepideh Farsi’s visceral and heartbreaking Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, about a Gazan photographer and her determination to stay alive, Alexandre O. Philippe’s Chain Reactions, a mesmerising documentary about a horror classic from 1974 and its impact on film history, Diego Céspedes’s The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, a queer drama from Chile about the “gay plague” (and the winner of the Un Certain Regard award earlier this year in Cannes), Oliver Laxe’s Sirat, a hauntingly beautiful and disturbing allegory of life on the edge, Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, an aesthetically astounding German drama seamlessly blending three families from different eras, and Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, a spectacular piece of slow cinema from Georgia dissecting the female body with raw fervour (which I originally watched in Venice, and became my personal favourite film of the year).
Overall, the film selection was overwhelmingly diverse and strong. The only significant disappointment came from Turkish-Iranian production Cinema Jazireh (Gözde Kural), with the grotesque representation of a crossdresser, middle-of-the-road storytelling and production values.
