Czeching In
A few thoughts on the 2024 edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
For the fourth consecutive year, I was a guest of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic. One of the foremost events for Eastern European cinema, as well as an excellent second-run festival for those wishing to catch up on titles from Venice, Berlin and Cannes, it’s a cinephile rendezvous I particularly enjoy for its blend of prestige and conviviality: it is the event where it’s easiest to just hang out with people in between and after screenings, to the extent that some of us actually have a group chat devoted to chilling together during the festival.
There was a bit of melancholy at play this year, at least for those who attended the first public screening in the Grand Hall, the festival’s main venue: for three decades, the highlight of those showings has been to see the so-called Microphone Man in action. At the end of each introduction, before the movie started, he would walk onto the stage, and simply place the microphone horizontally on the floor, to great applause. Apparently, this was something he originally did simply because the staff had forgotten to remove the mic, and it stuck for some 30 years. Until June 29, when he officially retired. I’ve been told there was a standing ovation. It was richly deserved.
On the more entertaining side of things, two introductions come to mind: the first was Alexandre O. Philippe, who this year co-curated a small retrospective about the American desert (tied to his own documentary The Taking, about the landscapes in Westerns with a particular focus on Monument Valley), warning audiences before the screening of Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms with the words of wisdom “I’m not going to wish for you to enjoy the movie, because you won’t.”; the second was Mark Cousins, asking the on-stage interpreter “Am I allowed to swear?” at the world premiere of his new film A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things.
That film went on to win the Crystal Globe, much to everyone’s surprise as a lot of us agreed it was a good film, but not Cousins’ best (compared to his usual output, it comes off as a tad conventional), and not the best in the main competition either. Then again, the fact that multiple awards went to the Norwegian movie Loveable (which I reviewed for The Film Verdict, if anyone’s interested to find out more) more than made up for it, effectively crowning Lilja Ingolfsdottir’s debut as the big winner of this year’s edition.
The Czech output was also stronger than usual, a fact highlighted by the audience award going to Waves, a formulaic but engaging period drama that might travel beyond national borders (perhaps as the country’s submission for the Oscars). The one true dud, among the Czech films I saw, was the comedy Our Lovely Pig Slaughter, which started promisingly before getting lost as it went off on tangents and never quite figure out exactly what it wanted to be about.
I was unable to attend the Kafka retrospective due to scheduling (I couldn’t be at the festival for the whole duration), which also speaks to the richness of a program that mixes the old and the new in an interesting fashion. For four years now, it’s been one of the more enjoyable parts of my summer, with a selection of films that almost always makes it worth it to sit through the screenings even in venues where the seats are, quite literally, a pain in the ass. If nothing else, it's a good warm-up for Locarno, which suffers from a similar issue in certain auditoriums. More on that in a month or so…