The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Central Europe’s biggest cinema fest and party, has a reputation for offering up a healthy mix of regional and international films, as well as a mix of serious and fun fare, including some more outlandish and challenging movies.
The festival’s 57th edition, running June 30-July 8 in the Czech spa town, is no different.
Here is THR‘s look at some of the more outlandish and bizarre-sounding films that it will offer up to cineasts and industry insiders from around the globe.
Sisu, Midnight Screenings section
Described as “a survivalist action film stripped down to the bone” on the Karlovy Vary festival website, Sisu features a tired unit of Nazis at the end of the war picking a fight with a lone man, portrayed by Jorma Tommila, in Finland. “Part Western and part ironic Finnish answer” to action flicks starring the likes of Sylvester Stallone, the movie was directed by Finnish director Jalmari Helander.
“Stoic determination, resilience, bravery, equanimity, and tenacity of purpose – these are the characteristics of sisu, a concept that Finns associate with their ‘national character’,” explains the Karlovy Vary site. “In the eponymous film, these qualities are embodied by a gruff man of few words capable of brutally and efficiently killing Nazis.”
In My Mother’s Skin, Midnight Screenings section
This is another film set towards the end of WW II, but this time, in the Philippine countryside. “A supernatural evil begins to infiltrate a home inhabited by a woman and two children,” says a plot description of the Kenneth Dagatan-directed movie on the Karlovy Vary website. “In My Mother’s Skin, which toys with a magical vision of the world that transforms the horrors of war into mythological monsters, is something like Pan’s Labyrinth mixed with Asian folk horror. A combination of horror flick and war movie, filled with slowly rising tension and eruptions of physical violence.”
THR‘s review from Sundance said that the “folk-horror feast evokes ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ in the best of ways.”
Captain Faggotron Saves the Universe, Midnight Screenings section
“Aliens are planning a ritual that could turn Earth into a homosexual planet,” explains a plot summary of the queer comedy from director Harvey Rabbit. “And the only one who can stop them is the superhero Captain Faggotron, who is nevertheless forced to ask himself one question: Is the world’s homosexualization really such a bad thing?”
The movie, whose cast members have names suited for a wrestling ring, such as Tchivett, Bishop Black and Rodrigo Garcia Alves, “fully embraces camp filmmaking, reveling in flamboyance, artificiality and, above all, the subversive lampooning of heteronormative popular culture,” notes the Karlovy Vary festival site. “In today’s world, this kind of shock therapy is certainly not aimed only at fans of LGBTQ+ films.”
Smiling Georgia, Special Screenings section
Like a lot of modern politics, the topic of this Georgian political and social documentary from filmmaker Luka Beradze is quite out there. But what sounds too crazy to be true is actually part of life in the country.
“During its 2012 election campaign titled ‘Smiling Georgia,’ the governing party promised its country’s poorest residents new teeth in exchange for their vote,” summarizes the Karlovy Vary fest’s online plot description. “Dentists began to pull people’s decayed teeth, but after the election defeat, the trusting public never received their new pearly whites.” The doc team introduces viewers to a sleepy Georgian village and its inhabitants, and showing “that it rarely pays to believe the promises of populist politicians and to vote for purely selfish reasons.”
Citizen Saint
Competition
Meanwhile, Tinatin Kajrishvili, another Georgian director, brings “a satirical parable about a saint who descends the cross to live among mortals” to the Karlovy Vary festival’s competition lineup, promises its online summary.
“On the main square of a mining town stands a cross depicting a saint, regarded by the local miners as their protector,” it explains. “One day, the cross is taken down for repair and the statue of the saint suddenly vanishes. When a mysterious stranger subsequently appears among them, the residents put two and two together…” The saint mentioned in the film’s title is portrayed by George Babluani.
A Sensitive Person
Competition
“Growing old isn’t for sissies,” says one of the characters in Jáchym Topol’s novel Sensitive Person, for which the author won the Czech State Award for Literature in 2017. Karlovy Vary is presenting the world premiere of its loosely adapted film version by up-and-coming Czech director Tomáš Klein. The festival’s artistic director Karel Och in an online summary of the film calls him “one of the most talented Czech directors.”
If that is not enough to whet your appetite, the “darkly grotesque drama” takes audiences down two paths. The real path features an actor Dad, his wife and their two sons as they try to return home. But there is also an imaginary path, on which “intellectual youthfulness feuds with circumstances that force the protagonist to acquire wisdom,” summarizes Och. Overall, the selector promises “a restless and zesty cinematic feerie about love, fear of loneliness, and sons gazing intently at their father.”
