Among the starry international guest list was feted US director Steven Soderbegh, who introduced both versions of his Kafka-inspired “silent film with sound”, Kafka (1991) and its shorter, more surreal, anarchic new metamorphosis, Mister Kneff (2021). Soderbergh was on playful form, at one point implying a mysterious stranger had broken into his house, stolen the film and remixed it without his knowledge. Very Kafka-esque.

Family psychodramas were also a key motif in the KVIFF program, alongside period pieces about the horrors of fascism in 20th century Europe, which packed extra punch given the current resurgence of far-right parties across the continent. Battlefield films from the Ukraine frontline featured prominently too, notably Oleh Sentsov’s remarkable “accidental” documentary Real, while Russian films were once again banned for the third year running. This is a poignant reversal given that Karlovy Vary was once the major shop window for Soviet cinema, and was even twinned with Moscow Film Festival during its early decades, when it partly functioned as a cultural outpost of Kremlin soft power.

But even if it cannot escape the long shadow of history, from Kafka to the Cold War, Karlovy Vary is emphatically not stuck in the past. With a youthful team of programmers under artistic director Karel Och, plus a lively young crowd drawn here by budget-price festival passes, this year’s edition felt loud and busy. With 453 film screenings and almost 130,000 tickets sold over a nine-day period, plus a constant background throb of outdoor music events and late-night DJ sets, it was certainly never boring.

Besides Soderbergh, other high-profile guests included Daniel Brühl, Clive Owen and veteran Czech screen star Ivan Trojan. But the warmest reception was reserved for Petr Folprecht, a KVIFF legend who earns wild applause every year for shuffling onstage and laying down the microphone stand used for screening introductions in the Grand Hall of the Thermal Hotel, the festival’s main hub. After 30 years on duty, and one final symbolic stage appearance on the festival’s opening weekend, Folprecht retired from his long-standing role on a wave of deafening cheers. This was a perfect mic-drop moment, Czech style.

For the film critic contingent at KVIFF, this year’s biggest shock came when the jury headed by US indie producer Christine Vachon awarded the main prize, the Crystal Globe, to A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things by Northern Irish director Mark Cousins. The first British feature to win the top KV award since Ken Loach’s Kes (1970) more than half a century ago, this love letter to Scottish painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham is a typically quirky, discursive, absorbing essay-film from Cousins, with narration by Tilda Swinton. But the choice to give a $25,000 prize and profile boost to a fairly minor work from an established film-maker instead of a more marginal voice, rising talent or first-time director still left many baffled.

The other big winner in the festival’s main competition section and beyond was Lilja Ingolfsdottir ‘s divorce drama Loveable, an emotional assault course starring Helga Guren as a 40-year-old wife and mother plunged into soul-searching depression when her marriage collapses. Sharply scripted and acted, Ingolfsdottir’s debut feature plays like a painfully raw therapy session at times. It took home the Jury Prize and Best Actress Award. plus a wide sweep of non-statutory prizes from unofficial juries too. Rumour has it the film has now been shortlisted for Norway’s official Oscar submission.

Also in the main competition, Singaporean Nelicia Low was crowned Best Director for her stylish but soapy Taiwanese psycho-thriller Pierce about the intense bond between two brothers, both highly skilled at fencing, one of them a homicidal sociopath. And sharing the Best Actor award were Dutch duo Ton Kas and Guido Pollemans, who play a fractious father and son in Peter Hoogendoorn’s beautifully observed tragicomedy Three Days of Fish. Meanwhile, the top winners in Proxima, Karlovy Vary’s more left-field secondary competition, were US-based Chinese director Zhengfan Yang’s Stranger, a series of single-shot mini-dramas all filmed in hotel rooms, and Peruvian Paulo Tizón gripping documentary Night Has Come, an intimate portrait of young recruits to an elite paramilitary police unit.

Outside the film selection, but still a key part of Karlovy Vary’s distinctive aesthetic personality, is the festival’s classy visual branding. This was especially strong this year, from eye-catching posters to smart new bags and a growing Taylor Swift-style range of official merchandise on sale in pop-up shops. Refreshed every year, the latest KVIFF logo is one of the best yet, deploying a versatile square and circle motif to represent celluloid film canisters, camera lenses, the concrete brutalist geometry of the Hotel Thermal, and more. Classic Czech graphic design, mid-century modernism remixed for the digital age.

Another charming KVIFF tradition is the ever-growing collection of bespoke monochrome promotional shorts featuring former celebrity guests of the festival, who are typically seen disparaging or even destroying their honorary Crystal Globe statuettes. This year’s addition to the pantheon was Benicio del Toro, a Karlovy Vary guest in 2022, who was filmed glumly wandering around a train station complaining about the tedious obligation of attending festivals to pick up dumb awards. Steeped in wry Czech humour, this inspired anti-marketing device is unique to Karlovy Vary. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any bigger, self-important film festival being so disarmingly ironic about itself. One day, somebody needs to compile all these wry vignettes into an epic all-star blockbuster of deadpan, bleakly funny, Kafka-esque comedy.

CRYSTAL GLOBE COMPETITION

Grand Prix
A SUDDEN GLIMPSE TO DEEPER THINGS
dir. Mark Cousins (UK)

Special Jury Prize
LOVEABLE / Elskling
dir. Lilja Ingolfsdottir (Norway)

Best Director
NELICIA LOW
for Pierce / Cì xin qiè gu (Singapore, Taiwan, Poland)

Best Actress
HELGA GUREN
in Loveable

Best Actor
TON KAS and GUIDO POLLEMANS
in Three Days of Fish (Netherlands, Belgium)

Special Jury Mention
XOFTEX
dir. Noaz Deshe (Germany, France)

OUR LOVELY PIG SLAUGHTER / Mord
dir. Adam Martinec (Czeck Republic, Slovak Republic)

Pravo Audience Award
WAVES / Viny
dir. Jirí Mádl (Czeck Republic, Slovak Republic)

PROXIMA COMPETITION

Proxima Grand Prix
STRANGER / Ju wai ren
dir. Zhengfan Yang (USA, China, Netherlands, Norway, France)

Proxima Special Jury Prize
NIGHT HAS COME / Vino la noche
dir. Paolo Tizón (Peru, Spain, Mexico)

Special Mention
MARCH TO MAY / Od marca do mája
dir. Martin Pavol Repka (Czech Republic)

The opening hook to Hunting Daze is a little contrived, but deftly handled. Far from home, stranded on a remote forest higwhay deep in northern Quebec, Nina (Nahéma Ricci) and her fellow strippers have run out of gasoline. Resourceful Nina calls in help from one of last night’s customers, Kevin ( Frédéric Millaire-Zouvi), who is part of an hunting party on a stag weekend in a cabin nearby. When this call-out leads to a bust-up with her douchebag male manager, Nina decides to hitch a ride with Kevin instead, thinking she can catch a bus back to Montreal. But on discovering her public transport options are non-existent, she ends up a reluctant guest at the all-male gathering instead.

While these macho city slicker are initially wary of allowing a woman into their testosterone-heavy safe space, older alpha-male team leader Bernard (Bruno Marcil) smooths everyone’s nerves by making Nina promise she will strictly follow the group rules: “You must act like a wolf,” he insists, “carry yourself like a man.” Part of Nina’s initiation into ritual masculinity entails learning to hunt, shoot and skin deer, even blasting one with a rifle at point blank range. Killing and eating animals in the wild, Bernard mainsplains pompously, is much more honest and honourable than the “murder by proxy” of buying meat at the supermarket.

The latent tensions behind Hunting Daze begin to surface after the group unexpectedly encounter Dudos (Noubi Ndiaye), a wandering stranger who appears to be an illegal African immigrant. At this point, Blanc seems to be priming us for a familiar finger-wagging lecture about problematic white males, with Nina an obvious target for sexism and Dudos for racism. To her credit, she steers the story in a more nuanced direction, starting with an accidental shooting injury and an agonising group debate about how to deal with it. The central conflict here is less about gender or racial difference than about wider power dynamics. Should we bow to peer pressure and take the consensus route, or challenge majority opinion to pursue a higher moral purpose?

From the start, the forest backdrop of Hunting Daze feels both real and symbolic, an off-grid fairy-tale space where the gravitational pull of normal human society begins to recede and dissolve. But Blanc really amplifies the more surreal folk-horror dimension during the film’s final battle of wills, adding heavy symbolism and hallucination, flaming rifles and witch-burning imagery, nightmarish visions and dead characters apparently coming back to life. Though often confusing, these scenes are visually impressive.

Viewed as an elevated genre exercise, Hunting Daze is a fun, twist-heavy ride with a kick-ass heroine and some gorgeous landscape imagery. Taken as a more serious contribution to the feminist thriller canon, however, it relies a little too much on its characters making poor decisions and risky choices, many of them wildly implausible, especially the explosive finale. Blanc poses some pretty interesting questions about power, patriarchy and red-meat machismo, but she never quite answers them, apparently preferring the thrill of the chase over any solid, satisfying conclusion.

Director, screenwriter: Annick Blanc
Cast: Nahéma Ricci, Bruno Marcil, Frédéric Millaire-Zouvi, Marc Beaupré, Alexandre Landry, Maxime Genois, Noubi Ndiaye
Cinematography: Vincent Gonneville
Editing: Amélie Labrèche
Music: Peter Venne
Producer: Maria Gracia Turgeon
Production company: Midi La Nuit (Canada)
World sales: ArtHood Entertainment GmbH
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Midnight)
In French
79 minutes

Blending staged scenes, newly captured documentary footage and archive material, the film does what the title promises: it provides as full a portrait as possible of an actress. And not just any actress: as the prize she received in 2015 attests, Iva Janžurová is a veritable legend in the Czech Republic. A star of stage and screen, she made her first film appearance in 1961, aged 20, and is still going strong: her most recent Best Actress nomination at the Czech Lion Awards – the nation’s highest honor for film and TV – was in 2020, for the dark comedy The Lady Terrorist.

Shadowing her throughout is the director, Theodora Remundová, an accomplished documentarian who also happens to have a personal connection to the subject: she’s the great actress’s daughter. This is stated outright in the film, but beyond what must have been facilitated access to her mother and the archive footage (particularly of her stage performances), Remundová never uses the familial bond to turn the project into an extended therapy session, as was the case with Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Jane by Charlotte in 2021.

In this case, Remundová is less a family member and more a professional, never letting personal feelings get in the way of the filmmaking, as she confidently assembles an overview of her mother’s career. And while there is undoubtedly a hagiographic component to proceedings, few would argue it isn’t warranted, given the longevity and prestige of Janžurová’s artistic path.

In fact, the film’s title has a double meaning, as it’s not just about a great actress of Czech cinema, but also about the craft of performance: mother and daughter (who has also acted alongside her famous parent on numerous occasions) engage in conversation about what it takes to create a compelling characterization, delivering a portrait of a talented artist at work. Of course, the presence of staged elements in the film add another layer, as we witness Janžurová describing her process (a scene where she reminisces about being required to cry on cue for a role is particularly illuminating) and then exhibiting it, constantly moving between her real self and a variation of her professional persona.

This adds some playfulness to a portrait that takes itself seriously without ever getting too precious or reverential about its depiction of the subject. Remundová may be dealing with a legend, but there’s also a human being behind the mask of the movie star, and Actress is an entertaining balancing act, a fun reminder for local audiences as to why they still respond so warmly to Janžurová’s performances.

Director & Screenwriter: Theodora Remundová
Producer: Alice Tabery
Cinematography: Jan Šípek
Music: Tadeáš Vercák
Sound: Štepán Škoch
Production companies: Cinepoint, PubRes, Ceská televize, RTVS, innogy, Slovenský filmový ústav
World sales: Cinepoint
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Out of the Past)
In Czech
110 minutes

The story kicks off when two friends from Casabalana, Sondouss (Oumaima Barid) and Jaffar (Youness Beye), arrive in a fancy villa in Cabo Negro, supposedly rented for a whole month by Jaffar’s teacher and lover Jonathan, who is yet to turn up. In addition to enjoying their time at the beach, cooking, browsing photo books, making tea, and hiking in the woods, Jaffar has a personal connection as his father is buried in the mountains nearby.

Both the film’s main characters are queer, and as the plot develops Jaffar and Sondouss get their hearts broken when their lovers ghost their calls. And as there is no sign that Jonathan is showing up, they start making ends meet to afford food and rent, eventually engaging in sex work, confronting societal and gender norms. Despite this heavy set-up, the film combines some of the playfulness of City of God (2002), the abandonment in Call Me by Your Name (2017), and the unrequited love in Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria Again and Forever (1990).

The house that the duo temporarily keep, poetically, ends up being a place for solidarity and acceptance, not just between the two, but for others who also have been pushed out by society. During their stay they run into a young French-Moroccan man who is visiting his grandmother’s grave, after his father banned him from seeing her when he found out he was gay. They also meet a man who escaped from prison and travelled from Casablanca, fleeing the police. Another encounter involves a group of sub-Saharan African refugees resting in the woods while on their way to the sea to head across to Europe.

In filmmaking terms, Taïa and his cinematographer Julia Mingo are rigorous and ascetic, brilliantly spotlighting the characters with their defeats and victories, and the constant solidarity they provide to other strangers. On the scriptwriting front, however, followers of Taïa’s novels, interviews, and debut film Salvation Army (2013) will easily spot some autobiographical elements and repeated themes. Like Taïa, Jaffar had an abusive upbringing which subjected him to repeated sexual violence and harassment by other men in his hometown in Morocco. Both Jaffar and Soundoss are fascinated by a coffee-table book showing posters of classic Egyptian films from the 1960s, and actresses like Souad Hosni and Faten Hamama; the same uncensored softcore femininity that attracted Taïa as a child. Soundoss picks up a book entitled Jihad for Love (translated here as ‘A Battle for Love’), the same name as a 2007 documentary Taïa was featured in, which explored the dilemmas of being Muslim and queer.

While these elements were integral in Taïa’s experience growing up in Morocco, and why he ended up living in Europe, he does not force them upon his character, thus distinguishing between his experience and their experience. Cabo Negro offers a new dimension to stories and films where the words ‘Arab’ and ‘queer’ are mentioned in the synopses, presenting a narrative that surpasses the much-discussed and overused angle on the “dilemma” of being Arab and gay. Instead, Taïa simply allows his characters to just live and be, and engage with other challenges. Indeed, the slow-burn and at times chaotic script does not lead viewers to any satisfying or comforting conclusion, hinting that Soundouss and Jaâfar are not waiting for some kind of clear salvation, a cleric or a parent to finally accept them as they are. They just live life to the fullest, on their own terms.

Director, screenwriter: Abdellah Taïa
Cast: Youness Beyej, Oumaima Barid, Julian Compan
Producer: Saïd Hamich Benlarbi
Cinematographer: Julia Mingo
Editor: Nobuo Coste
Production companies: Barney Production (France)
Coproducers: Mont Fleuri Production, Sihamou
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Proxima Competition)
In Arabic, French, English
76 minutes

Tropicana opens with an arresting image: a long, static medium shot of a naked woman dragging herself across a supermarket floor at night, smearing a trail of blood behind her. But anyone expecting some kind of murder mystery to follow is too steeped in conventional film syntax, as this homicidal attack soon becomes a marginal background detail in the life of the film’s stoical, thick-skinned anti-heroine. Orly (Irit Sheleg) is a middle-aged menial worker at the same grim-looking store where the attack took place, a cavernous grocery warehouse on the edge of town. Soon Orly makes a pitch for the dead woman’s newly vacant position as head cashier, grovelling to her boss, subtly badmouthing her potential rivals.

Back home in her grimy, mice-infested apartment, Orly’s domestic life mostly involves caring for her immobile, morbidly obese son and severely disabled mother, who has a poisonous tongue and a taste for hardcore pornography. On learning that Orly’s boss gave her a promotion, her instant response is to assume it was a sexual transaction: “did you go down on him?” she rasps, “did he touch you?”

Discreetly, Orly also has assignations with various clandestine lovers, relationships which Tobi leaves opaque and unexplained. One lengthy encounter involves a wheelchair user who has lost both legs below the knee, a sequence shot in a detached, slow-burn, almost real-time observational style. There is tenderness and empathy here, but also an uncomfortable air of voyeurism, plus glum hints that Orly is being paid for sex.

Drawing on autobiographical memories of the small town where he grew up with his family, Tobi paints the dusty backwater setting of Tropicana as a liminal space of eternal night, missed connections and solitary souls, an Edward Hopper painting transposed to the Israeli desert. Any last trace of warmth, friendship and joy seems to have packed up and left town long ago. A creepy, Lynchian otherness also hangs heavy here. As she locks up the supermarket at night, Orly spots a naked man in the parking lot, lurking and threatening. Naturally this bizarre sighting is left unexplained and unresolved.

In his Karlovy Vary press material, Tobi frames Tropicana as a celebration of body-positive images, championing desire and intimacy in the face of prudish, conservative Israeli society. A worthy motivation, but his tonal choices often work against these avowed intentions. Because this is a film full of bitter, alienated souls living miserable, repressed lives. With recurring focus on naked bodies of all shapes and sizes, it could be interpreted as a defiant statement against narrow and unrealistic beauty standards, but it often feels more intrusive than inclusive. Like Austrian provocateur Ulrich Seidl, Tobi seems a little too fixated on carnal desire as ugly, desperate, joyless compulsion. But in place of Seidl’s dark, deadpan, redeeming humour, the younger director deals mainly in low-voltage despair.

On the positive side, what saves Tropicana from sinking into pure misery porn is Tobi’s strong aesthetic voice, finding visual poetry in this spiritually bereft, emotionally barren twilight zone. A surreal scene set in an underground desert bunker, which appears to be some kind of health spa, has an eerie sci-fi horror feel, partly because the screenplay offers minimal explanatory dialogue or context, leaving viewers to imagine some nameless horror lurking around the next corner. As a feature debutant, Tobi shows ample promise here, crafting a moody, cryptic semi-thriller from thin and disjointed material. Hopefully next time he can apply this stylistic flair to a more coherent, substantial narrative.

Director, screenwriter: Omer Tobi
Cast: Irit Sheleg, Rivka Bachar, Ilanit Ben Yaakov, Dover Kozashvilli, Amir Ishar, Rinat Matatov
Cinematography Philippe Lavalette
Editing: Guy Nemesh
Art director: Ben-Zion Porat
Producers: Hilla Medalia, Gil Sima, Paul Cadieux
Production companies: Medalia Productions (Israel), Sima films (Israel)
World sales: Sima Films
Venue: Karlovy Vary Interational Film Festival (Proxima Competition)
In Hebrew
82 minutes

Reinforcing hope in humanity while not underplaying the hellish nature of genocidal warfare is hardly an easy task for cinema. But co-directors Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev manage to beautifully strike a balance in their moving and sensitive portrait of an artist couple (Slava, and his partner Anya Stasenko) who maintain their practice of sculpting, firing, and painting figurines in Kharkiv, 25 miles from the Russian border, while Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine rages. Slava also turns his attention, through reluctant necessity, to uglier tools, training civilians who have never picked up a gun before to be defenders against the oncoming professional army. Slava films their experiences in collaboration with his best friend and fellow artist, Andrey Stefanov. Porcelain War is made up of their footage, as well as exquisite sequences in which the paintings on porcelain creations are animated. Both their art and this documentary have been made as acts of resistance, with the trio all too aware that the destruction of culture and its makers, and the silencing of people’s histories, is an imperialist strategy harnessed by the Russian regime for Ukraine’s erasure. Ukrainian folk music quartet DakhaBraka provide the soundtrack, their exquisite and haunting harmonies infused with fierce emotion and the flair to reinvent.

It is easy to scare people, but hard to forbid them to live. That’s one of numerous wise aphorisms voiced in a documentary that ponders the paradoxes of the current fraught situation under invasion. The sunny, bucolic world of nature is contrasted with drone footage of charred Ukrainian cities subjected to apocalyptic decimation, as war echoes through nature in explosive objects and craters, and air alarms scream disturb the air. Slava and Anya still go to the woods to collect mushrooms, a favourite Ukrainian pastime, despite the fact they are now just as likely to uncover landmines under moss as they are edible fungus. They knock “danger” signs into the ground where mines are found, and continue on their way; they would risk more, as far as they see it, by not going at all and trying to exist locked in their basements. Even so, the decision of whether to stay and defend their home city or flee is excruciatingly difficult, and family separation is an inevitable source of anxiety and pain. The couple’s two daughters are living in exile, and stay in touch through the flat screens of technology; a panicked, perilous thousand-kilometre journey over a snowy mountain pass with no brakes to the border to take them to safety is recounted with nerve-shredding immediacy.

Porcelain War runs the gamut of emotion. A warm and steady optimism flows from discussions around the reflections of the artists and defenders on their creativity and resilience, interspersed with alarming, high-adrenaline footage from the frontline of Bakhmut, where “hell is happening” and death hangs close. This is not simply a triumphal celebration of patriotism, which is also explored as a paradox, in all of its virtues and flaws, as the battle for freedom necessitates sacrificing one’s personal life and safety. In its tribute to the inspiring, endlessly inventive aspects of human behaviour that extreme situations of pressure can reveal, Porcelain War stands out as one of the stronger recent documentaries to emerge on the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, which currently has no end in sight, and on human resistance and psychological adaptation in times of war generally.

Directors: Brendan Bellomo, Slava Leontyev
Screenwriters: Aniela Sidorska, Brendan Bellomo, Paula DuPre Pesmen
Producers: Aniela Sidorska, Paula DuPre Pesmen, Camilla Mazzaferro, Olivia Ahnemann
Cinematographer: Andrey Stefanov
Editing: Brendan Bellomo, Aniela Sidorska, Kelly Cameron
Music: DakhaBrakha
Sound: Sam Hayward
Production companies: Finch No Worries (Australia), Imaginary Lane (USA)
Sales: Submarine Entertainment
Venue: Karlovy Vary (Horizons)
In Ukrainian, Russian, English
87 minutes

A Sudden Glimpse is divided into loose chapters with titles such as “From a Distance” and “Willie’s Brain,” as it charts Barns-Graham’s life, with Cousins positioning the keen traveller’s excursion to climb the Grindelwald glacier in Switzerland in 1949 as a before-and-after moment of epiphany in her search for inspiration. The creak of the glacier’s ice is part of the beautifully evocative sound design. Few women at the time ventured up this extreme terrain. It changed Barns-Graham’s inner world, becoming the focus of her subsequent paintings, a number of which Cousins considers in lively stretches of poetic analysis. Abundant still photos of her life also provide occasion for reflection. Cousins hones in on details, pointing out then undercutting assumptions. An initial picture of the subject from her later years shows a woman in “old lady glasses” and a “sensible overcoat” — before a forceful, offbeat personality and singular talent is revealed. Cousins is always aware that images are as much sites for our projections as they are evidence for our learning; that prejudice and a failure to pay attention means the most valuable qualities are frequently overlooked. The young Barns-Graham was regarded as a dramatic beauty but described herself as a “lone wolf,” and had a cruelly domineering father who kept a whip at the dinner table and condemned her artistic ambitions. She soon became adept at escaping restrictions, and after studying art at Edinburgh moved away from Scotland and her family to St Ives in 1940,  where she became part of its pioneering group of modernists.

In an industry prejudiced against taking women seriously, Barns-Graham used her nickname “Willie,” and often left uncorrected people’s assumption on paper she was a man to improve her work’s sales prospects. Later in life, she was unfairly considered an “also ran” of the modernist movement, according to her biographer Lynne Green, though the deep appreciation with which she and Cousins discuss the vitality of the artist’s vast body of painting convey its power. “A life of brain-building” is how Cousins sums up her time on the planet, with her one marriage to a younger architect over by 1960, and her conceptual quest for freedom and harmony of expression the centre of a documentary with both feminist credentials and charming originality. The shrinking of the glacier in an age of climate change is a motif, reminding us of the transient nature of time and more destructive human tendencies, against which Cousins seems determined to safeguard flashes of creative brilliance by refreshing our collective memory.

Director, Screenwriter, Cinematographer: Mark Cousins
Editing: Timo Langer
Music: Linda Buckley
Sound: Ali Murray
Producers: Adam Dawtrey, Mary Bell
Production company: BOFA Productions
Sales: Reservoir Docs
Festival: Karlovy Vary (Crystal Globe Competition)
In English
88 minutes

A fully independent production, put together by two companies that are just as youthful as the film’s protagonists (Albedo Production was founded in 2021, DO Consulting & Production in 2016), Chlorophyll thinks green from the very moment the title card flashes on the screen. It’s the story of Maia (Sarah Short), a girl with naturally green hair who is tired of city life: while everyone else thinks about partying, she decides to spend the summer picking oranges (a famously ominous fruit in the context of film).

This puts her in contact with Teo (Michele Ragno), who owns the farmhouse and takes particularly good care of plants and flowers, which he uses to create unique scents and perfumes. As he bonds with Maia, she also starts to blossom, literally: it is suggested throughout the film that her desire to connect with nature may be more than a simple wish to get away from city life, and appears to be tied to a mysterious event that took place in the woods when she was twelve years old. Also present is Teo’s older brother Arturo (Domenico De Meo), who is drawn to Maia but not quite sure how to deal with her less human characteristics.

Given Ivana Gloria’s background in animation, one can wonder if that medium might not have been a better choice for this fairytale-tinged coming-of-age story, which nonetheless boasts plenty of charm and is solidly assembled in live-action form. A tale of literal transformation, it finds its main strength in Gloria’s collaboration with cinematographer Giuseppe Chessa, whose approach to warm colors conveys the sweaty allure of summer and the preponderance of the color green in Maia’s life, sometimes to not-so-charming effect (in an early scene, intended to highlight the character’s disconnect from the teenage community she’s supposedly part of, even her vomit matches her hair).

In the midst of all that beauty and turmoil, the film’s main shortcoming is that it is, in fact, too short: at a brisk 75 minutes, some of the more evocative material is barely given time to breathe, and it’s time to part ways with Maia and Teo just as we were really getting to know them, with the performances of Short and Ragno creating an understated yet endearing bond that provides a charming human element against the somewhat fantastical backdrop and adds personality to a script that, while far from impersonal, is a recognizable genre spin on familiar teen tropes. The kind of spin that is just about hypnotic enough to set this project apart from its peers on the emerging end of the Italian scene.

Director: Ivana Gloria
Screenwriter: Marco Borromei
Cast: Sarah Short, Michele Ragno, Domenico De Meo, Angelo Zedda, Nina Viola Dessì, Greta Zedda, Laura Mura
Producer: Cinzia Salvioli
Cinematography: Giuseppe Chessa
Production design: Francesca Melis
Costume design: Antonella Mignogna
Music: SOHA
Sound: Silvia Orengo, Lorenzo Confetta
Production companies: Albedo Production, DO Consulting & Production
World sales: Albedo Production
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Proxima Competition)
In Italian
75 minutes

World premiering this week at both Karlovy Vary and Munich film festivals, Xoftex is only Deshe’s second dramatic feature, the belated follow-up to his Venice prize-winner White Shadow (2013). Commendably ambitious in intention, but frequently confusing in execution, it ultimately feels like a half-successful misfire, falling short of its grand performance-art vision. Even so, it should grab further festival interest and specialist screening outlets based on its newsworthy subject and bold stylistic flourishes.

Xoftex grew out of Neshe’s work with NGOs and refugee organisations between 2016 and 2019, notably in a notorious camp in northern Greece named Softex, so-called because the site was a former toilet paper factory. There he found rampant corruption and poor conditions, but he also established a fertile collaboration with an Italian theatre company, running drama workshops with stateless migrants. Much of the film’s dramatised scenes are drawn from these interactions with real-life asylum seekers. Meanwhile, Neshe is also working on a documentary about the Softex camp’s real former residents and how their stories developed.

The film’s central viewpoint belongs to Palestinian-Syrian teenager Nasser (Abdulrahman Diab), who shares a basic cabin home in the camp with his brother Yassin (Osama Hafiry). Stuck in a nightmarish limbo as they await their life-changing asylum decision, which can typically take between 12 and 18 months, the brothers and their fellow residents pass the time with homespun creative projects.

Filming on their phones, Nasser and Yassin stage fake TV news bulletins, zero-budget action thrillers and satirical skits about the tragicomic absurdism of migrant life. At one point, reacting to conspiratorial rumours that the Greek government is deliberately poisoning residents as part of a sinister medical experiment, they shift into shooting scenes for a zombie movie. These activities become coping mechanisms, welcome distractions from a life of numbing monotony and Kafka-esque uncertainty.

There is a lot going on in Xoftex, not all of it coherent or engaging. One sporadic subplot concerns the residents plotting retribution against a knife-wielding maniac who terrorises the camp on a daily basis. Another concerns people-smuggling gangs charging residents for helping them flee Greece for the Balkans by dangling underneath passing trains, with only a metal saucepan lid as protection from lethal flying stones. In a more conventionally structured film, these events would have gripping emotional power, but Neshe’s haphazard approach to plotting and character dilutes any dramatic momentum.

One of the film’s more esoteric motifs is a recurring reference to the “Casimir effect”, a theory from quantum physics which seeks to explain the mysterious attractive forces generated between objects in a vacuum, typically two parallels metal plates or mirrors. How this relates to the main refugee drama is not clear, unless as some kind of opaque metaphor. In the final section, Nasser appears to get his wish to settle in Sweden, where his sister already lives. But this chapter is the most surreal in the film, full of dreamlike visuals and jarring temporal shifts, leaving viewers with no clear narrative resolution.

If Neshe’s intention is to try an evoke the disorienting, alienating, mentally scrambling effect of refugee life, he succeeds all too well with Xoftex. That said, there is much to savour here in the film’s fable-like look and feel, including poetic images of exploded mirror sculptures, magical indoor trees and bizarre stone-carved UFOs hovering over the camp. The strikingly geometric camp setting is actually a fake recreation, constructed alongside a rail yard in Germany. A lively, flavoursome ensemble cast includes both actors and non-professionals, many of them former asylum seekers. The director also co-wrote the percussive, discordant score and handled the restlessly kinetic camerawork himself. Both help amplify the story’s underlying horror-thriller subtext.

Director, cinematography: Noaz Deshe
Cast: Abdulrahman Diab, Osama Hafiry, Jalal Albaroudi, Hazem Saleh, Moutaz Alshaltouh
Screenplay: Noaz Deshe, Babak Jalali
Cinematography: Noaz Deshe
Editing: Felipe Guerrero, Noaz Deshe
Music: Thomas Moked-Blum, Noaz Deshe
Producer: Andro Steinborn
Production companies: Arden Film GmbH (Germany), The Cup Of Tea (France)
World sales: Arden Film GmbH
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Crystal Globe Competition)
In Arabic
99 minutes

Paolo Tizon’s documentary follows a batch of recruits – many of them teenagers – as they undergo the demanding instruction required to join the Peruvian Armed Forces. In particular, they are being prepared to become one of the elite fighters despatched to carry out a war on drugs in the infamous VRAEM region of the country. Tizon’s film follows them closely as they suffer through all manner of physical training exercises, while also remaining at their sides during downtime, revealing their motivations, fears, and friendships. Night Has Come, which premieres this week as part of Karlovy Vary’s Proxima competition is a depiction of an almost ultimate machismo, while also taking note of its beating emotional heart.

Peru is second to only Colombia in the production of cocaine and the VRAEM, or Valle de los Rios Apurimac, Ene y Mantaro, is an area of the country in which most of its drug growing and trafficking takes place. As such, it is a region of significant military intervention and in order to succeed there, special operators need to be able to cope with anything. This is partly why the endurance training we see the soldiers go through is so robust. Across the course of the film Tizon’s camera captures them performing airdrops with parachutes, grenade throwing drills, combat scenarios, injury and medical aid practice, and some punishing night manoeuvres. At times, it can make for gruelling viewing and, while seeing the stress the candidates have to suffer through is the precise point, being that near to the action for an extended period can make the film drag.

That said, where Night Has Come absolutely makes up for it is in the more low-key sequences with the candidates. Tizon is beside them all of the way and while that sometimes means watching on as they are blasted with a powerful hose in the middle of the night, it also means sitting be them while their eating from ration cans while out on manoeuvres. The evident rapport that the filmmaker built up with the subjects means they feel open to discuss things with him that we – or even they – might not expect. At one point, one recruit looks around at who’s next to him before freely admitting how close he is to his mother and how he still sometimes clambers into bed with her in the night. Others confess to having had relationship issues before they deployed or to the difficulties they have with their families.

The other side to this same element of the film is seeing the guys together during downtime, how openly the talk about the same things they discuss with the filmmaker. In one sequence various people give one person advice on how best to reply to the ex-girlfriend who has just messaged him. In other instances, we see the recruits making and receiving calls from home – in particular Helmet 57 who Tizon shows in an ongoing series of calls. with his mother who tells him how upset his father is that he only calls her. Later he receives a call and some of the relationship issues previously implied are shown directly.

All of this means that when we see the recruits being submerged in freezing water in some kind exposure training, we’re not watching a homogenous mass of soldiers this group of individuals who all have their own reasons for being there, for gritting their teeth and suffering through. Tizon’s beautiful cinematography emphasises this same point, presenting the frolics of brothers in a river fighting over a rubber ring in the same language as two recruits shivering together as water is poured all over them. His camerawork is loose, often ululating with the rhythms of his breathing and bringing the audience into step with the subject. He’s happy for frames to be dirtied by the equipment that lies in the foreground, or by the body of comrade huddled close to the person talking. It not only brings the soldiers intimacy into focus, but also brings us into a similar familiarity. One that can’t help but make these young men’s travails all the more impactful.

Director, screenplay, cinematography: Paolo Tizon
Producer: Diana Castro
Editing: Martin Sola, Paolo Tizon
Sound: Johnatan Darch
Production company: Cinesol Films (Peru),
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Proxima Competition)
In Spanish
93 minutes

Read more of the team’s coverage of KVIFF 2024.

It is a tall ask for such a young performer, but she rises to the challenge with aplomb delivering an impressively nuanced and authentic performance. Her Amalka is everything a six-year-old tends to be: charming, combative, fragile, frustrating, wide-eyed, intense, clingy, independent. Amalka is a character who has to cycle through these varying modes of childhood across a brief 76-minute running time and it is on the shoulders of this pre-adolescent actress that the success of Tiny Lights ultimately rests, as Beata Parkanova’s film competes for the top prize, the Crytal Globe, at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

The entire film is constructed to contemplate and replicate the experience of its protagonist, most notably in the case of the cinematography. Parkanova and her DoP, Tomas Juricek, shoot a lot of the film at the hip, literally, in bringing the camera down to Amalka’s eyeline. Unlike Laura Wandel’s similarly-shot Playground, Parkanova allows some flexibility in this – cutting away or widening the frame to provide space for the other characters in Amalka’s family to inhabit the screen. Where Wandel’s film used this technique to create a mounting intensity, Parkanova and Juricek’s visuals allow for the ebbs and flows of her drama, releasing tension when necessary. Still, the close-up focus on Amalka keeps her specific understanding of or reaction to events at the forefront of our mind.

Those events take place across the course of a single day in which Amalka’s parents reach a point of no return in their faltering marriage and Amalka comes to gain something like an understanding of what is transpiring. It begins when she comes down from her bedroom to find herself locked out of the living room while her mother (Elizveta Maximova), father (Marek Geisberg) and grandparents (Veronika Zilkova and Martin Finger) argue from the closed door. Amalka’s mother is evidently unhappy, and her own parents are dismayed at her selfishness given she has a young daughter. These recriminations continue as Amalka has breakfast with her parents, plays in the garden, goes swimming with her grandfather, watches her favourite tv show.

Seeing the drama from this unusual perspective means that the broader narrative is nearly always happening at or beyond the edge of the frame. With Amalka sat in the centre of the composition and just her mother’s hip and hand (holding Amalka’s) in frame, we hear her strained conversation with her parents as she drops Amalka off with them. While Amalka studiously collects together pinecones during a countryside walk, off-screen we hear her grandparents’ appraisal of their daughter’s actions.  It is perhaps the perfect way to depict a disintegrating relationship, through the petty annoyances, passive aggression and unspoken recriminations.

Of course, though, the real crux of the drama is what is happening on screen as it is Amalka’s response to these stimuli that warrant the greatest attention. What makes this way of parsing this events, and Banko’s performance, so affecting are the tides of emotion and understanding. She is clearly a smart girl who understands the situation that is brewing asking pointed questions at the breakfast table that never address it directly but show her father she has a certain comprehension. As the day progresses her mood and needs change – she is comforted in the arms of her grandfather but rebellious and breaking the heads off the flowers of the neighbour’s garden. She acts out in certain moments and stays demurely quiet in others. It makes her as funny and sweet and infuriating as the whims of a six-year-old can be.

Inserted into this straightforward narrative drama are a handful of very brief inserts. They are presented as uncropped frames on a strip of celluloid, each is just a few seconds long, interrupting the verisimilitude. Quite how to interpret these inserts is left up to the viewer but one way is to see them as memories being formed by Amalka in the moment. Celluloid – particularly grainy 16mm or Super8 – is often used to imply the past or memories. Here, it feels like rather the suggesting a memory being recalled, they suggest one being created. One clip just shows Amalka’s mother in close up, tears in her eyes; another seems fascinated by the play of light from a crystal ornament on her grandmother’s mantelpiece. They seem to be fragments, the shapes and curious details – and snippets of unacknowledged emotion – that Amalka is committing to her memory. It adds a further layer of complexity to exactly how a young child is able to process what she is experiencing and they ways these events, while almost tangential to her day, will have a lasting impact.

Director, screenplay: Beata Parkanova
Cast: Mia Banko, Elizaveta Maximova, Veronika Zilkova, Martin Finger, Marek Geisberg
Producer: Vojtech Fric, Premysl Martinek, Martin Palan, Ondrej Kulhanek, Maros Hecko, Peter Veverka
Cinematography: Tomas Juricek
Editing: Alois Fisarek
Music: Michal Novinski
Sound: Viktor Krivosudsky
Production design: Petr Bakos
Production company: Love.FRAME, Bontonfilm Studios (both Czechia), Azyl Production (Slovakia)
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Crystal Globe Competition)
In Czech
75 minutes

Read more of the team’s coverage of KVIFF 2024.

“Can you tell me how you first met?” says an off-screen voice (later revealed to be the couple’s therapist) in the opening scene. Maria (Helga Guren, in her first leading role) goes on to explain how she was dealing with the end of her first marriage and having to co-parent two young children when she met Sigmund (Oddgeir Thune) at a party. The two eventually connected, but all is not well seven years later, mainly because Sigmund is constantly away for work and Maria is exhausted as a result. She takes it out on him, at which point he initiates the discussion about divorce. This causes Maria to go on a metaphorical journey of self-rediscovery, as she looks back on the relationship and whether it was a healthy one to begin with.

The subject is heavy, but that doesn’t stop Ingolfsdottir, making her feature debut, from being playful with the tropes of on-screen depictions of relationships and their dissolution. Most memorably, she is cheekily on-the-nose with her song choices: a montage of early passion is accompanied by a Swedish tune saying “Do you think we’ll see each other again? Do you think we’ll live together?”; the morning after the first break-up talk features the French classic Ne me quitte pas (“Don’t leave me”); and a later flashback gleefully shows Sigmund singing a Norwegian hit titled Optimist.

The story may be told from Maria’s point of view, but the director empathizes with both characters, gradually highlighting how neither of them is exempt from the shades of gray that characterized their marriage, and the actors convey that feeling very well, with Thune being particularly impressive in that he has just as much of an impact despite (deliberately) having a smaller role. Sigmund also gets to deliver the sharpest line in the script, so devastating it pops up again when his soon-to-be-ex-wife imagines him saying it during sex: “Be prepared for me leaving this relationship.” That the phrase is uttered in Norwegian, a language known for its somewhat sing-song quality, makes it even juicier.

The nuance in the characters’ rapport is probably what attracted the attention of producer Thomas Robsahm, who also worked on Joachim Trier’s acclaimed The Worst Person in the World and is once again drawn to a story featuring the various layers of a relationship, albeit in a slightly less humorous manner this time around. Ironically, given the subject matter, it’s the children who are somewhat adversely affected, as there are hints of intriguing subplots (the teenage daughter threatening to move back with Maria’s former partner) but not enough screentime devoted to what could have added another perspective to complement that of the two parents.

Director & Screenwriter: Lilja Ingolfsdottir
Cast: Helga Guren, Oddgeir Thune, Heidi Gjermundsen Broch, Marte Solem
Producer: Thomas Robsahm
Cinematography: Øystein Mamen
Production design: Lilja Ingolfsdottir
Sound: Bror Kristiansen
Production companies: Nordisk Film Production, Amarcord
World sales: TrustNordisk
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Crystal Globe Competition)
In Norwegian
101 minutes

Set amidst the magnificent landscapes of the Western Himalayas, and shot in beautiful monochrome, Mahajan’s first film – which she has written and directed – premieres in the Proxima Competition in Karlovy Vary and depicts a journey of suffering, recovery, and rebirth. Departing the city in favour of a rural haven, its protagonist acclimatises to the rhythms of a different kind of life that allow her the space to psychically and emotionally heal not just herself but others too. In the crux of a specifically female pain, Second Chance uses gentle drama punctuated with regular humour to galvanise renewal. Despite its chilly seasonal setting, the film is like a warm embrace.

When the story begins, Nia (Dheera Johnson) has retreated from New Dehli to the snow-capped mountains of Himachal Pradesh. An overheard voice message bristling with desperate energy tells us that she has fallen pregnant to her boyfriend Kabir and has been driven to take some pills to instigate an illicit termination, so her parents won’t find out. As she hides out in their old family home in the hills, surrounded by the locals that look after the place, she continues trying to contact Kabir with no luck. Meanwhile, she must hunker down in the increasing winter cold and when the caretaker of the house leaves on urgent business, Nia is left with his crabby old mother-in-law, Bhemi (Thankri Devi), and her tearaway 8-year-old grandson, Sunny (Kanav Thakur) for company.

Their time together is a mixed bag of anguish and comedy. Nia is a big city girl who wears her evident privilege nonchalantly while attempting to keep the reason for her visit quiet. She tells everyone that she is just there for a break, to help clear her head, keeping her recent abortion private. There is an inclination that she wants to share her pain with her sister, but in a phone call in which we only see Nia’s side, it becomes clear that her sister has just found out she is pregnant and cannot fly out there. Around her, Bhemi tries to get on with the everyday labours of working life in poor, rural India – spinning yarn for a local shepherd, preparing their meals. She is constantly chiding Sunny who races around the place pretending to be Superman or forcing Nia in a cricket match. Reports from school say he’s difficult and a troublemaker and when he secretly tries to adopt a stray cat only for it ruin all of Bhemi’s spinning, you can see why.

The transformation that Nia undergoes during her time at the house is not just one of repairing her own body and coming to terms with her recent trauma. There is a more fundamental shift for her in how the experience of recuperation heals deeper ailments than just her most recent. Through snippets of conversation, we come to learn about Nia’s difficulties in successfully settling on a career – much to the chagrin of her father – but also that this is perhaps because she has given up her dreams of becoming a dancer in favour of following other people’s ideas about what she should do. In the process of healing alongside Bhemi and Sunny, she comes to attain an essential sense of inner peace that resonates with empathy. This is not a quality that is gendered, but in Nia’s situation, it is difficult not to equate this change in her with a burgeoning maternalism that she perhaps didn’t feel before. This is most evident in the way her relationship with Sunny evolves over the course of the film, from her initial refusal to engage with him or doing so under duress – offering some of the film’s funnier moments – to coming to understand him more. His mother, Bhemi’s daughter, died in childbirth and Sunny is under the impression that she lives on the moon now. His repeated – grating – playacting as Superman is revealed to be a desire to fly and visit her and a scene in which Nia showing him footage of the moon landings, and explaining what an astronaut is prove surprisingly poignant.

All three characters are, in their own ways, due another opportunity having been written off in some way and Mahajan’s screenplay brilliantly weaves together their stories. A lot is required of her performers, though, and all three are exceptional. Dheera Johnson does stand out, and her portrayal of Nia is intricately layered and contradictory, allowing her to be flawed and unsure while remaining incredibly appealing. Her background in dance also helps as some scenes in which Nia processes her feelings through private performance – while having the potential to be off-putting – are vital and moving. She’s also brilliantly aided by Takri Devi and Kanav Thakur who steal most scenes and are non-professional actors, cast from the local area. They may add a geographical and social authenticity to Second Chance, but it’s central story conveys its most precious and pertinent truths.

Director, screenplay: Subhadra Mahajan
Cast: Dheera Johnson, Thakri Devi, Kanav Thakur, Rajesh Kumar, Ganga Ram
Producer: Shyam Bora
Cinematography: Swapnil Suhas Sonawane
Editing: Tinni Mitra
Music: Quan Bay
Sound: Anirban Borthakur
Production design: Namra Parikh
Production company: Metanormal Motion Pictures, Latent Pictures (India)
World Sales: Diversion
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Proxima Competition)
In Hindi, English & Kullavi
104 minutes

Read more of the team’s coverage of KVIFF 2024.

A glassy pond in a forest clearing seems to function as some kind of gateway between sleeping and waking worlds. As humans emerge from the hibernation that has preserved them through the bitterness of a snowy winter, as if coming out of a dream or hatching from pods into a new form, they seek each other out, and slowly rediscover a sensuous awareness of their bodies and environment. Relationships between the humans in this community are vaguely defined and nebulous, but it appears that the nuclear family is no longer a primary organising concept, as one individual reflects on having been raised by a mother and three fathers. Human inhabitants are also experimenting with communicating more like the animals that live amongst them, endeavouring to read minds or detect heartbeats, their wordless screams echoing through the forest as the moos of cattle sound back. The purpose of the activities of the humans who dwell here — harvesting the eyes of cows, for instance — is hard to determine in a universe with close parallels to the one we understand, but which operates according to a new and baffling natural order.

Snails writhe together, snakes slough their skins, chicks hatch and raccoons scuttle around, in a natural world alive with the transitions of a myriad of creatures in their seasonal cycles, its dark, rain-soaked foliage and close-ups vibrant with detail atmospherically lensed by D.O.P. Artur Pol Camprubi. Constant birdsong carries an awareness of teeming, multi-faceted existence. But the winter, equally beautiful in its snowy quiet, can be fatal in its bitter coldness, and the inhabitants know that they must prepare, even though the most brutal season’s length is hard to determine.

Much of the film is silent, cloaked in unspoken mystery, and meditative. When humans do speak, the reflections they share with each other present almost as somnambulant or floating monologues, as they voice their existential anxiety for the unknown to come, and reminisce with palpable grief about experiences, such as eating flowers in “better times,” that they will never have the chance to enjoy again. It is evident that, beyond regular seasonal cycles, a deeper, unwelcome transition is afoot, that the world they are familiar with is dying, and finding new ways to survive meaningfully in their environment requires a process of adaptation without rules for guidance. The usual hubris of humanity in believing themselves superior to other creatures and plantlife will not help them here, and, as goats stand about nonchalantly on living room furniture, the people here seem to have long come to understand and accept this. There is talk of a higher power to be sensed in the fields at night, but what this force constitutes is left as mere suggestion. The Human Hibernation is a film which, in its obscure conjecture, formalistic performances, and unexplained, imagistic mysteries, may frustrate those looking for a narrative that clearly works out a plot premise. But its esoteric ambiguity is also is strength, leaving space for audiences to forge their own significances and reflections on our era of planetary crisis, and showing Anna Cornudella Castro as an impressive voice with a distinctive, poetic signature.

Director: Anna Cornudella Castro
Screenwriter: Anna Cornudella Castro, Lluis Sellares
Cast: Clara Much Dietrich, Valentine, Demetrius Hollimon, Jane Hubbell, Brian Stevens
Producer: Gerard Rodriguez
Cinematographer: Artur Pol Camprubi
Editing: Marc Roca Vives
Music: Emili Bosch Molina
Sound: Laura Tompas
Production companies: Japonica Films (Spain), Batiak Films (Spain)
Sales: Begin Again Films
Venue: Karlovy Vary (Imagina)
In English
86 minutes

Celebration begins in 1945, when Croatia’s wartime fascist state has already failed. Mijo (Bernard Tomic), who had been an Ustasha soldier, is hiding in the woods out in the open elements above his former home, fearing that the communist partisan forces who have been heard lurking around in the meadow below will shoot him in retaliation. His beloved wife Drenka (Klara Fiolic) pays him clandestine visits. She is building him a shelter by cover of night, but it is difficult to make progress on it with so many eyes around. Mijo grasps onto the hope that if he bides his time he can return to a simple farming life, his Ustasha ties forgotten, but guarded distrust permeates the village, and it seems unlikely wartime atrocities will simply be washed away by the biting, torrential rain he huddles in. D.O.P. Aleksandar Pavlovi, in shadowy greens and browns under an inky sky, evocatively paints the forest not as a place of shelter and safety, but one of existential gloom, the sombre moodiness reinforced by a spare soundtrack.

The background of the Ustasha’s rise, its ideological underpinnings, and its war crimes are not closely delved into, and without prior contextual knowledge, the politics of the time come across as murky and vague. This is a film that is interested less in geopolitics than in a portrait of human nature under strain and starved of options, forging pragmatic allegiances for survival. Beyond a few dreamscape sequences, we do not venture far into Mijo’s inner world or internal conflict, in a film that hangs greater consequence on his family’s near-starvation, and suggests simple people are mere pawns of wider historical forces. There is a sinister swagger and self-importance to the militaristic ambitions to power and influence of Rude (Nedim Nezirovic), the shiny-booted brother of his then-new sweetheart Drenka, as the festivities night of the newly declared puppet state draws revellers together. Mijo, by contrast, is more focused on catching carefree moments with his sweetheart as they cross the woodland to converge on the party. He is sucked into fascist complicity by circumstance and a creeping amorality, rather than malice.

In the summer of 1943, the villagers are banned from keeping dogs after one bites a gendarme. A traumatic, shocking incident — all the more devastating, by playing out through suspense and off-screen suggestion — offers a key to Mijo’s derailment by brutality, after his father orders him to get rid of beloved farm dog Garo, and the family cannot afford a merciful bullet. Violence begets violence, and in wartime, cruelty spreads like a contagion, Ankovic suggests in such symbolism-laden moments. The howl of surrounding wolves as night closes in on the woods seems no less than a stark foreboding of predatory times closing in on wartime Europe, an alarm signal from nature with special resonance today on a continent again lurching to the far right.

Director: Bruno Ankovic
Screenwriter: Jelena Paljan
Cast: Bernard Tomic, Kresimir Mikic, Klara Fiolic, Lars Stern, Jan Dolezal, Nedim Nezirovic, Tanja Smoje, Izudin Bajrovic, David Tasic Daf
Producers: Rea Rajcic, Tina Tisljar
Cinematographer: Aleksandar Pavlovi
Editing: Tomislav Stojanovic
Music: Alen Sinkauz, Nenad Sinkauz
Sound: Julij Zornik
Production companies: Eclectica (Croatia), Pakt Media (Croatia)
Sales: Eclectica (Croatia)
Venue: Karlovy Vary (Crystal Globe Competition)
In Croatian
86 minutes

Forced to return to his rundown hometown in Bulgaria having long since moved to Spain with his mother, Kaloyan (Ognyan Pavlov, otherwise known as the rapper “FYRE”) is less than overjoyed to be there. He is visiting to handle his father’s affair in the wake of his death, primarily the clearance and sale of his flat. When in an early scene someone asks Kaloyan why he wasn’t at his father’s funeral, his sullen silence tells us all we need to know about the state of their relationship – we later learn they hadn’t spoken in more than a year. While dutiful in making the trip back, he evidently finds the place oppressive, his childhood memories the catalyst for a brick wall built to keep them at bay. It’s this experience Vesnakov captures acutely in Windless, which premieres in the Proxima Competition of this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival. It’s an experience of being railroaded into reckoning with your past and having to wrestle with questions of if and how we honour it.

Kaloyan is a moody and reflective individual and Vesnakov embraces these characteristics to create the milieu of the entire film. This is the world as seen by the protagonist – from the muted coolness of the colour-palette to the notable 1:1 shooting ratio. We’ve seen that same boxy aesthetic used to convey a psychological claustrophobia in the past, most notably in Xavier Dolan’s Mommy, and it is similarly effective here. It makes the world feel incredibly tight around Kaloyan. Each thing he interacts with that brings back unwanted memories fill the screen, as if he is being challenged by it, face on.

What is perhaps most interesting about this dynamic in Windless is that the memories being presented to Kaloyan are diametrically opposed to his own and so the tension comes not from the external stimuli but from our inference of the character’s emotional state. Almost every person that discusses Kaloyan’s father, Asen, in the film does so with a sense of reverence and depth of emotion that his own son long ago discarded. Old comrades speak of his bravery and self-lessness, friends of his compassion and sense of duty to his family, others of his overwhelming generosity of spirit. The whole film is punctuated with anecdotes that create a portrait of a much-loved and respected man who was selfless to a fault. It is a testament to Vesnakov’s skill as a filmmaker and Pavlov’s impressive performance, that we feel a tightness in our gut at such kind words.

These conversations form a recurring motif in the film’s structure, with Kaloyan confronted by a variety of people – typically of his father’s generation or older – who either reminisce specifically about Asen or provide a broader context to the town in which Kaloyan was born and his father spent his life. With each one Kaloyan has another perspective to challenge or reinforce the one he already holds, of a town that offers few prospects and a father who never loved him. Late on, he tells his friend (Veselin Petrov) about overhearing his father once say that you should only ever kiss your child while they are asleep. Asen’s tough love approach seems to have had more of an impact on his son that he could have imagined.

Between these conversations, the two friends rove around while Kaloyan waits for the money from the sale to clear. He helps out with odd jobs, doing rubbish clearances that are the result of a new casino and highway development that is seen as progress and opportunity by some and the destruction of a community by others. One such development involves the cemetery meaning that Kaloyan must arrange for the removal of the bodies of his father and grandparents. At the film’s beginning, he wants this sorted with as little input from himself as possible, but as he sees the disregard with which people are treating the past, and he comes to have a nuanced view of his own, this gradually shifts. Films about homecomings and coming-of-age are all about arriving at new perspectives and this is absolutely Windless’s central arc. Pavlov doesn’t necessarily change the outward demeanour of his performance, but it seems to innately soften as he sees both the town and father he was thankful to have left behind with fresh eyes. In what is a quiet and understated film, it makes for a hugely compelling watch.

Director: Pavel G. Vesnakov
Cast: Ognyan Pavlov – “FYRE”, Veselin Petrov, Mihail Mutafov, Nadya Derderyan, Lidia Vulkova, Konstantin Trendafilov, Vasil Binev,
Producer: Veselka Kiryakova
Screenplay: Pavel G. Vesnakov, Simeon Ventsislavov, Teodora Markova, Nevena Kertova, Georgi Ivanov
Cinematography: Orlin Ruevski
Editing: Victoria Radoslavova
Music: Ascari
Production design: Severina Stoyanova
Costume design: Marieta Spasova
Production company: Red Carpet (Bulgaria), disparte (Italy)
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Proxima Competition)
In Bulgarian
93 minutes

Read more of the team’s coverage of KVIFF 2024.

Courvoisier was raised in Jura, a département in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region of France, famous for its Comté cheese. And it is there that she decided to set her film, paying homage to her roots via the story of Totone (Clément Faveau), an 18-year old boy whose main concerns in life are drinking beer and attending local fairs and parties with his friends. When tragedy strikes through the premature death of his father, he suddenly has to figure out how to support himself and his seven-year old sister. One idea would be to manufacture the perfect batch of Comté, which would be worth 30,000 euros in prize money in a local contest. Except, of course, Totone knows next to nothing about the whole business. Which is where the strategy of seducing the young but seasoned farmer Marie-Lise (Maïwene Barthelemy) comes into play…

Filmed entirely on location in Courvoisier’s native village, Holy Cow has a lived-in atmosphere that undoubtedly stems from the circumstances of the production: the crew, some of whom slept in her house during the shoot, was a mixture of out-of-town professionals and locals (including members of the director’s family), while the cast consists solely of regional non-actors who had to put their day jobs on hold for eight weeks and contribute their rural experience to the film (Faveau, whose character is fairly ignorant of agricultural life, was training to become a chicken farmer at the time of the casting).

The chaos that occasionally disrupts the daily routine of these people was also part of the production process: one scene in particular, involving the real birth of a calf, almost got derailed when the cow’s planned schedule didn’t align with the crew’s. As such, while the screenplay does wallow in the classic coming-of-age tropes, there is an unrehearsed spontaneity to the performances, enhanced by the regional accent, that elevates the material, particularly when the chemistry between Faveau and Barthelemy (both of whom should at least consider acting as a continuing side gig in the future) is required to provide some bucolic charm to the film’s more contrived plot points.

Besides the young natural talents in front of the camera, the major star of the picture is cinematographer Elio Balezeaux, another feature first-timer (his only previous credit is a short), who expertly captures the sweaty allure of everyday life in Jura, the vibrant youthfulness of the new generation and the appeal of the Comté culture, with scenes so perfectly lensed the cheese’s smell and taste come close to breaking out of the screen and hit the viewer head-on. And at that point, it becomes irrelevant whether Totone will win the contest or not: the real win is the movie itself, a confident calling card for everyone involved and one of the more charming French debuts in recent years.

Director: Louise Courvoisier
Screenwriters: Louise Courvoisier, Théo Abadie
Cast: Clément Faveau, Luna Garret, Mathis Bernard, Maïwene Barthelemy, Lucas Marillier, Dimitry Baudry, Armand Sancey Richard
Producers: Muriel Meynard
Cinematography: Elio Balezeaux
Production design: Ella Courvoisier
Costume design: Thierry Delettre
Music: Linda Courvoisier, Charlie Courvoisier
Sound: François Abdelnour, Sandy Notarianni, Thomas Besson
Production companies: Ex Nihilo, France 3 Cinéma
World sales: Pyramide International
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Horizons)
In French
90 minutes

These are molten material that harden into pumice as they hurtle through the air, sometimes landing in their molten form and solidifying where they fall to create strange, otherworldly rock formations. Formations like these – and many others – form one half of the subject matter of Paula Durinova’s feature documentary debut, Lapilli, which premieres in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima Competition. The other half of her subject is the passing of her grandparents, an anguish that she works through by exploring and communing with the landscapes that she subsequently shares with us. Her beautiful film forms from a coalescence of geology and grief, a partnership that is as exquisite when you experience it as it is unlikely when you merely write it down.

Durinova begins to draw parallels quickly, to place the audience in the space she was herself inhabiting. In the opening moments she makes reference to her grandmother slowly petrifying as she lay in a post-Covid coma, and to the death of her grandfather shortly after as evidence of the pair’s interdependent existence across 60 years of marriage. She frames their death in ecological terms. Of course, all death is, in a sense, ecological, but Durinova’s personal connection to the earth in the wake of her loss transforms her grandparents into microcosmic allegory to an enormous process. She initially equates the death of her loved ones with the transformation of the Aral Sea, from the fourth largest inland body of water in the world in the 1960s, to a largely dried-out basin today. In the introduction she intones, “nobody could predict what its disappearance would uncover…” the fact that she could be referring to the lake or her grandparents is precisely the point.

At one point, Durinova observes that her grandfather was an experimental physicist, and her grandmother was very spiritual. She notes that examination was important to them, even if in one case it was an external endeavour and the other occurred inwardly. The filmmakers impulse, then, to combine the emotional journey with the physical world seems to make sense. Lapilli uses as its basic structure the stages of grief – which is typically separated into five parts: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. For the most part this is done in the voiceover, provided by the filmmaker, which narrates both the stories of her grandparents and her own musings. The visuals, on the other hand, are almost solely interested in the geological. However, there are ways this partition is eroded in both directions. Rather than labouring her structure by dividing the film into distinct chapters, Durinova instead attempts to evoke them through the landscapes, seeking out formations that mimic or evoke the bodily reactions to the various steps in the journey of grieving.

The kinds of images Durinova captures – she undertook all of the cinematography herself – find a variety of novel ways to present stark landscapes – though they are no less visually interesting for it. There are formations whose striations seem to mimic a stack of papers, while bubbling puddles shot in close up that might, upon initially appearing, have been ponds or lakes. The film includes extreme, mildly shaky close-ups of patterns in the rock, as well as wide sweeping vistas of shapes hewn by eons. As the focus shifts through different phenomena, caves begin to take on a significance and there are some spiritual moments of subterranean wonder accompanied by Petra Harmanova on the autoharp that give it both an eerie and transcendent quality. Perhaps most astonishing of all are the moments in which the formations really do begin to take on human characteristics. We are, of course, designed to looks for shapes and patterns but there are times in this film in which human forms feel almost as if they are conjured by Durinova’s words, by her search for her grandparents.

At only 65-minutes in length, Lapilli can hardly be accused of outstaying its welcome, but it is certainly possible that for those that struggle to attune to its frequency it could feel overlong. However, if catches you in the right frame of mind, its slowness feels patient and tentative, its diaristic qualities feel deeply personal. For many people, certain landscapes hold a particular potency that might not exist for others and may be difficult to articulate – Lapilli is an example of someone impressively, and generously, sharing hers.

Director, cinematography: Paula Durinova
Producers: Matej Sotnik, Viera Cakanyova
Screenplay: Paula Durinova, Dane Komljen, Tamara Antonijevic
Editing: Paula Durinova, Deniz Simsek
Music: Petra Hermanova
Sound: Agnes Menguzzato, Paula Durinova
Production company: Guca films (Slovakia)
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Proxima Competition)
In Slovak
65 minutes

Read more of the team’s coverage of KVIFF 2024.

Recorded by accident on Sentsov’s helmet-mounted GoPro camera during last summer’s counteroffensive, just as Ukraine began pushing back against Russian forces in the south-east Zaporizhzhia region, Real may well be the first ever “found footage” war film. Presented raw and unedited, aside from minimal post-production tweaks, this is hardly a great piece of cinematic entertainment by conventional standards, but it is both a fascinating historical document and bold stylistic experiment. Following its world premiere in Karlovy Vary this week, it is very likely to grab further festival interest and more, based on its newsworthy subject and innovative, immersive format.

The Crimea-born Sentsov has a high-profile track record as film-maker, dissident and political prisoner. In 2014, after Putin’s forces illegally annexed Crimea, he was arrested by Russian authorities and accused of plotting terror attacks on the peninsula. Following a disputed confession, reportedly obtained by force, he was sentenced to 20 years in an Arctic penal colony. His trial was denounced by Amnesty and the global film community, including Russian directors Andrey Zvyagintsev and Alexander Sokurov. Following a five-month hunger strike in 2018, he was finally released under a prisoner exchange in September 2019.

Real is filmed entirely in a cramped military trench with the deafening whoosh and boom of bullets, mortar shells, drones and tanks serving as an ever-present background soundtrack. Sentsov and his men mostly exhibit a calm, resigned demeanour which defies their life-or-death situation, sheltering in the trench after their armoured vehicle was hit by enemy fire. Essentially a walking camera, the director never appears on screen but his gruff, barking voice figures prominently. As a key commander during the battle, he spends most of the film’s 90-minute run on his radio, desperately trying to arrange evacuation for wounded comrades and fresh ammunition for others pinned down by Russian forces – or “fuckers”, as the defenders call their invaders, with typically salty Ukrainian wit.

With its shaky camerawork, repetitive radio exchanges, and confined setting, Real has scant functional use as either rousing propaganda or journalistic reportage. But there is value in its wholly unstaged, uncalculated, observational insights into the banal boots-on-the-ground business of war, with the very real threat of sudden death hovering just outside every frame. There is surreal humour here too, when it emerges that the Ukrainian army name their positions after famous football teams: Real Madrid, Chelsea, Marseilles and more.

Although very little action happens on screen in Real, Sentsov’s determined effort to orchestrate a rescue for his stricken brothers in arms is gripping, part tragedy and part farce. The film ends abruptly, when the camera battery drains, but a blunt credits caption reveals that 22 Ukrainian fighters died in the battle. Three more of the men seen on screen have since been killed in action. Ukraine’s senior army command do not come out well from these chaotic events, and Sentsov did not seek their approval for his film, even hinting in interviews that he may be punished. All the same, he remains on active military duty, earning special permission to travel to his Karlovy Vary premiere.

Real was never planned as a film. Sentsov only discovered his accidental battlefield footage months after it was shot, and his initial impulse was to delete it. But after consulting with his long-time producer Denis Ivanov, he came to be persuaded that this material had value as a close-up record of an unfinished conflict. The director and his team then did some basic post-production work, mainly colour correction and sound mix, but essentially this is an authentic, immersive document of war in the raw. Real is real.

Increasingly compact, portable camera technology has made close-up battlefield documentaries from the frontline in Ukraine something of a growth genre in recent years. Some other notable examples include Eastern Front (2023) by Yevhen Titarenko and Vitaly Mansky, which premiered in Karlovy Vary last year, and Enemy in the Woods (2024), a BBC production directed by Jamie Roberts using Ukrainian army footage. Real is not the first or the finest film in this trend, but it a valuable piece of living history on its own uncompromising terms, the latest cinematic despatch from the tragic ongoing disaster movie of 21st century Russian imperialism.

Director, cinematography: Oleh Sentsov
Sound postproduction: Igor Kazmirchuk
Image postproduction: Oleksiy Moskalenko
Producers: Denis Ivanov, Oleh Sentsov, Mike Downey, Boris Matic
Production companies: Arthouse Traffic (Ukraine), Cry Cinema (Ukraine), Propeler Film (Croatia), Downey Ink (UK)
World sales: Arthouse Traffic
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (special screening)
In Ukrainian
90 minutes