The Karlovy Vary Film Festival will once again present award-winning films from the top world festivals in its Horizons, Another View, and Open Eyes sections. Horizons is one of viewers’ favorite festival sections, and, given this year’s programming choices, it will probably remain so. As an example, the Karlovy Vary IFF has succeeded in obtaining virtually all the winning films from February’s Berlinale. “We have the movies from the Berlinale mainly thanks to our foresight in requesting them during the festival, in some cases without knowing whether or not they would win,” explains Karlovy Vary IFF artistic director Eva Zaoralová. According to Ms. Zaoralová, it helped having solid contacts to those companies with the films’ international distribution rights.
Karlovy Vary will, for example, present this years Golden Bear winner, the Spanish-Peruvian film The Milk of Sorrow. Its heroine is a girl named Fausta born to a Peruvian woman raped during the political strife of the 1980s. When her mother dies, Fausta must come to terms with this long-ago family trauma. The film’s 32-year-old Peruvian director, Claudia Llosa, is the youngest person to win Berlin’s main prize.
Two films awarded the Grand Jury Prix will also come to Karlovy Vary – Germany’s Alle Anderen and Uruguay’s Gigante. Alle Anderen is an intimate, witty, and cruel portrait of a young couple’s search for identity in their relationship. In addition to the Grand Jury Prix, the film also took Best Actress. Gigante tells the story of a young supermarket guard and his obsession for a colleague named Julia. The film also won the Alfred Bauer Award at the Berlinale; Tatarak from Polish legend Andrzej Wajda shared the same award, and is also coming to Karlovy Vary. The movie focuses on the wife of a small-town doctor who, out of boredom, has an affair with a much younger man until their romance is marked by tragedy. In the film, Wajda also deals with a true story – involving similarly tragic losses – of the actress playing the main character.
Karlovy Vary will also screen the Iranian film About Elly, whose creator, Asghar Farhadi, was awarded Best Director at the Berlinale. Focusing on the story of repatriate Ahmad, it tells of the young Iranian generation’s efforts to make its way in a conservative land.
Other festival winners will also be screened at Karlovy Vary. The Horizons section will present Venice’s Golden Lion winner, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. Two other notable winners have been included in the Another View section – Mexico’s Parque vía, which took the Golden Leopard at Locarno, and from the Sundance festival, the winner of the World Cinema – Dramatic Award: the Chilean film La Nana.
Films from the recently-held festival in Cannes, which the Karlovy Vary IFF regularly features in its Open Eyes section, are still under negotiations. But KV IFF organizers promise that a number of them will certainly be seen for the first time in the Czech Republic at Karlovy Vary. “We also requested films from Cannes before the awards were handed out,” says artistic director Eva Zaoralová. She adds that the program department of the Karlovy Vary festival is in negotiations with the companies representing Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet. “We are negotiating for other films that weren’t in the competition, but were presented in the Un Certain Regard section, the International Critics Week, or the Quinzaine des réalisateurs section. We hope to have an answer this week,” says the artistic director.