– The festival’s 60th edition will feature a broad cross-section of contemporary cinema, spanning Cannes and Berlinale laureates, European auteur work and formally adventurous discoveries
Fjörd by Cristian Mungiu
The 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF, 3-11 July) will honour Juliette Binoche, Dustin Hoffman and cinematographer Robert Richardson with a Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema, while actors Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeffrey Wright and Slovak actress Magda Vášáryová will receive the President’s Award. Director Kyra Sedgwick and actor-director-producer Kevin Bacon, together with Travis and Sosie Bacon, will personally present the film Family Movie at the festival. The gathering will open with Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco’s documentary The Match, while Noah Segan’s melancholic crime-drama The Only Living Pickpocket in New York will close this anniversary edition.
The event boasts a strong concentration of European features and co-productions by established auteurs alongside more formally adventurous and genre-driven work. In Horizons, several pictures turn the family into a pressure chamber in order to probe broader social and moral questions: Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner Fjörd examines parenthood, identity and welfare systems through the story of a Romanian-Norwegian family accused of violence towards their children, while Andrius Blaževičius’s Sundance Best Director Award winner How to Divorce During the War sets an intimate marital rupture against the first few hours of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved shifts the focus to the hierarchies of cinema itself, through a filmmaker’s fraught attempt to work with his estranged actress daughter, while Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas combines personal drama with a metafictional reflection on artistic exploitation and emotional exhaustion.
Questions of history, masculinity and social belonging also run through the selection. Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cannes Best Director winner Fatherland follows Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika on a post-war journey through divided Germany, while Lukas Dhont’s Coward, recognised at Cannes with a Best Actor Award for Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne, revisits World War I through a queer love story shaped by fear, desire and the threat of discovery. Visar Morina’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize Dramatic winner Shame and Money turns economic precarity into a surgical critique of dignity, as measured through labour and income, and Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend expands the human scale altogether, using a university ginkgo tree to connect stories of curiosity, science and nature across more than a century. Horizons will also feature Valeska Grisebach’s Cannes Jury Prize winner The Dreamed Adventure, İlker Çatak’s Berlinale Golden Bear winner Yellow Letters, Sandra Wollner’s Un Certain Regard laureate Everytime, Markus Schleinzer’s Rose (which earned Sandra Hüller the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance), Marie Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster and Arthur Harari’s The Unknown, further extending the section’s European through-line, bringing together established and emerging voices across questions of memory, identity, political pressure and historical unease.
The programme’s more formally elastic strand takes on the guise of Imagina, where established auteurs and experimental voices test the boundaries of narrative cinema. Angela Schanelec’s My Wife Cries approaches crisis through stark fragments and charged silences, while Lisandro Alonso’s Double Freedom returns to the world of his breakthrough Freedom in an ascetic meditation on work, communication and human autonomy. Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada brings 16 mm texture to a haunted Cornish time-loop mystery, and Jakub Kučera’s Because I Have To adds a Czech essayistic feature to the section’s exploratory line-up.
Meanwhile, Afterhours, the midnight-orientated sidebar, gives the festival a European genre inflection. Hanna Bergholm’s Nightborn turns new parenthood into a bloodthirsty horror scenario rooted in motherhood, family and cultural displacement, while the animation Jim Queen by Marco Nguyen and Nicolas Athane adds a French-Belgian title to the late-night selection.
The full line-up is available to peruse here.
