Karlovy Vary Film Festival Puts Iranian Cinema in Spotlight, Pays Tribute to Japanese Filmmaker Yasuzo Masumura
The 57th edition of Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival, which runs June 30-July 8, has planned a retrospective program focused on Iranian cinema with a selection of films made in the past four years. The festival will also celebrate the work of Japanese filmmaker Yasuzo Masumura.
Commenting on the Iranian cinema program, the festival said in a statement: “Collectively these works offer an insightful testimony of the burning creativity of Iran’s artists in face of the challenging reality. Nine mostly young filmmakers – urgent, unheard voices – who palpably bear a spiritual connection to the previous generations of their country’s greats, tackle the current reality with a remarkable sensitivity and great inventiveness.
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“Melancholic dramas, comedies, war movies, sci-fis…films about love, and films within films. Together, these nine unique and intensely personal testimonies form a multi-dimensional mosaic that reflect the collective spirit and openness of Iran’s young cinema of today.”
The nine Iranian films will be “No End” (Nader Saeivar, 2022), “The Locust” (Faeze Azizkhani, 2022), “Zapata” (Danesh Eqbashavi, 2023), “The Skin” (Bahram Ark, Bahman Ark, 2023), “Dream’s Gate” (Negin Ahmad, 2023), “A Trip to the Moon” (Mohammadreza Shayan-Nejad, 2021), “Black and White River” (Farzin Mohammadi, 2019), “Creation Between Two Surfaces” (Hossein Rajabian, 2019) and “K9” (Vahid Vakilifar, 2020).
Nader Saeivar’s Kafkaesque nightmare “No End,” co-scripted and co-edited by Jafar Panahi, explores, with vivid realism, the control and humiliation of the individuals by their authoritarian regimes.
“The Locust” is a film within a film: a comic drama and a docu-fiction. The second directorial effort from Kiarostami’s protégé Faeze Azizkhani is an ingenious hybrid of a movie, anchored by the director’s authentic female perspective.
“Zapata,” Danesh Eqbashavi’s rousing genre blend of comedy, detective fiction, and mockumentary, was filmed with two iPhones, a small hand-held camera, a GoPro action camera, and the appreciable influence of Roger Corman.
“The Skin,” the debut from the Ark brothers, hotly anticipated since 2017 when they won a Cinéfondation prize at Cannes for their short piece “AniMal,” is an innovative fantasy horror flick blending genre elements with local folk legends.
Negin Ahmadi is the young director and protagonist of mesmeric debut “Dream’s Gate,” a soul-searching documentary that leaves Tehran to follow the lives of an all-female militia group fighting in Syrian Kurdistan.
Produced by the filmmaking collective Kamja, “A Trip to the Moon” by Mohammadreza Shajan-Nejad follows the zany exploits of a man venturing to recover the sounds left to him by his partner in a bottle before leaving on a trip to the Moon.
“Black and White River” by Farzin Mohammadi tells the story of the artistic crisis facing young filmmaker Amin, who is trying to recover lost time.
“Creation Between Two Surfaces,” the second film by photographer and filmmaker Hossein Rajabian, is an adrenaline rush that boldly seeks wisdom in madness. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” the director gradually transforms film reality into a psychiatric nightmare.
Vahid Vakilifar’s “K9” offers an intoxicating, visionary sci-fi, which, in spite of the darkness consuming the world, remains a believer in the power of light.
The retrospective’s curator Lorenzo Esposito said: “This cinema should not be read with the regular tools we use to decode most films. This cinema compels us to reinvent our tools, to reinvent how we see and interpret film, in order to engage with the intentions of these filmmakers. As the title of a poetry collection by Forough Farrokhzad read: ‘We present here and now another birth of Iranian cinema.’”
Masumura (1924-1986), a towering figure of post-war Japanese cinema, is the subject of the fest’s tribute program. Long neglected in most of the Western world, the zany films of Masumura have been gaining traction over the past decade, attracting new devotees and forcing critics and academics to reassess his position within the Japanese New Wave.
Two decades after his work began to circulate around Europe and the U.S., albeit in limited fashion, the films of Masumura now rank among the leading film discoveries of the 21st century – a highly eclectic, unabashedly confrontational body of work with rebellious politics and highly distinctive aesthetics.
The titles of the retrospective are “Kisses” (Kuchizuke, 1957), “The Blue Sky Maiden” (Aozora musume, 1957), “Giants and Toys” (Kyojin to gangu, 1958), “A Wife’s Confession” (Tsuma wa kokuhaku suru, 1961) “Black Test Car” (Kuro no tesuto ka, 1962), “All Mixed Up” (Manji, 1964), “Hoodlum Soldier” (Heitai yakuza, 1965), “The Spider Tattoo” (Irezumi, 1966), “Nakano Spy School” (Rikungun Nakano gakko, 1966), “The Red Angel” (Akai tenshi, 1966), and “Blind Beast” (Moju, 1969).
“Masumura has proven that mainstream cinema can be as bold, as political, as perceptive, as its arthouse counterpart,” Joseph Fahim, the program’s curator, said. “Constantly breaking barriers and blurring boundaries between art and commerce, the films of Yasuzo Masumura are no less revolutionary than the best of Samuel Fuller, Nicolas Ray or Frank Tashlin. This retrospective, held in anticipation of his 100th anniversary next year, aims to not only introduce audiences from around the world to Masumura’s wild cinema, but to cement his growing reputation as one of Japan’s great film masters.”
Since 2015, the program Future Frames – Generation NEXT of European Cinema, organized by European Film Promotion and Karlovy Vary, has helped emerging talented European directors launch their careers in the film industry. The program is now expanding the pool of opportunities provided to the filmmakers through its partnership with Allwyn, a leading global lottery operator, and a collaboration with U.S.-based talent agency UTA and management company Range Media Partners.
Each year, 10 film students and graduates, recommended by the EFP member organizations, are selected by the program department of Karlovy Vary to showcase their short and medium-length films to the festival audience. The selected filmmakers also participate in a tailored mentorship program that includes training, networking and promotion elements.
This year’s edition of Future Frames will take place from July 2-5. Allwyn Future Frames Lounge, a new creative and networking area located in the Thermal Hotel festival center, will host training and networking sessions for the participants and will also serve as a space for one-on-one meetings with UTA and Range Media Partners representatives. They will provide feedback and guidance and ultimately choose one director, who will receive a special scholarship, sponsored by Allwyn – enabling them to spend a month in Los Angeles, learning from the best in the film industry.
The visuals for this year’s Karlovy Vary have once again been designed by Studio Najbrt, specifically by Jakub Spurný and Aleš Najbrt.
Commenting on their design, Spurný and Najbrt say, “After last year’s illustrated poster, the visuals for the 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival have been composed using four colored lines that act out an experimental game with legibility and motion involving the number 57. This approach enables a number of additional variations, both static and animated. With a crack of the whip, we can begin!”
As part of its long-running project of premiering digitally restored copies of important works of Czech cinema, this year’s Karlovy Vary will be showing Evald Schorm’s “Courage for Every Day.”
Schorm’s 1964 feature-length debut is a key work of the Czechoslovak New Wave. Based on a screenplay by Antonín Máša, the film took a new approach to exploring the moral crisis felt by the generation that experienced the social changes following the condemnation of Stalin’s cult of personality.
The KVIFF President’s Award will be presented to actor Daniela Kolářová at the closing ceremony of the festival’s 57th edition. Kolářová is one of the most distinctive Czech actors of the past several decades.
This year’s festival section for film professionals has a new sponsor – the PPF Foundation. The foundation’s mission is to support projects that help to export Czech talent abroad or that bring foreign sources of inspiration and information about the international context to the Czech Republic.
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