Big-time cinema in little baroque Karlovy Vary

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Stills from the movie A Nagy Fuzet (The Notebook)

It may sound somewhat childlike and gushing, but I have to admit that my first visit to the Karlovy Vary Film Festival had me racing back to my childhood days when fairytale books enchanted you with illustrations of castles and woods, streams and flowers, kings and humble folk.

The little town of Karlovy Vary is just that and plenty more. Baroque yet homely, speckled with colonnades, parks, little shops full of splendid crystals and of course, spas, those unique thermal springs used for drinking therapy, baths and lavages that have given the town its reputation. The water’s healing power has attracted a string of celebrities over the centuries: Beethoven, Ataturk, Chopin, Turgenev, Peter the Great, Goethe, Freud and several members of the European royalty. The tradition continues (at present with hordes of Russians) in this mini town of 55,000 people.
But what galvanises this tranquil Bohemian settlement is its prestigious film festival whose first edition dates back to 1946. For forty years it was held under the aegis of a socialist state, often alternating with the Moscow festival. But it stagnated post-1989. Twenty years ago, Czech actor Jiri Baroska and film critic Eva Zaoralova rescued it from the dumps and turned it to an A grade event. Bartoska continues as its president and Zaoralova is artistic consultant.
Situated in the very heart of Europe, it is little wonder that the Karlovy Vary Film Festival (June 28-July 6) is the principal showcase for Central and East European cinemas. Films from the Americas have some presence here, but there is little from Asia and practically nothing from Africa or the Arab world. The current edition, however (the 48th), turned the spotlight on Kurdish cinema — the cinema of a nation divided into various countries, and without a real film industry of its own. Fourteen features and shorts from Iran, Iraq, Turkey and the diaspora, showed the very serious issues of survival and exile that people continue to face. Serif Goren’s The Road (an old film based on a script by one of Turkey’s greatest directors, Yilmaz Guney, who gave the director precise instructions from prison cell) is about inmates on parole having to face fear and the police as well as merciless restrictions imposed by traditional morality. Bahman Ghobadi’s Rhino Season (Iraq-Turkey) was a melancholic tale of love that wove romantic poetry and magical pictures into a critique of the regime. Shawkat Amin Korki’s Kick Off describes how a football match is organised by an enterprising young man for refugees in Kirkuk. But there were others that brought a light touch to a serious issue. III Girls by Nahid Ghobadi (Iraq) tells how the President of Iran receives a petition from III Kurdish girls demanding the government find them husbands or else they will commit mass suicide by jumping off a cliff.
The festival features several sections apart from the main, East of the West and documentary competitions. The Crystal Globe for Outstanding Contribution to Cinema was given to American director Oliver Stone, to actor John Travolta and to Czech artist and designer Theodor Pistek.
Fourteen films mostly European, featured in the main competition. At least five dealt with war as a backdrop or trigger for changed relationships. A Nagy Fuzet (The Notebook) by Hungarian director Janos Szasz took the laurels as also the Europa Cinemas Label Award. Emotionally powerful yet neutrally narrated, it is set in the time of Hungary’s occupation by Nazi Germany, and describes the story of twin brothers transformed by the violence they see around them, and pushed into becoming violent themselves.
Papusza by Polish directors Krzysztof Krauze and Joanna Kos-Krauze which received a Special Mention, was also set before and during the war when the Roma (gypsies) of Poland were persecuted by the Nazis and later by the Polish authorities. One Roma woman who teaches herself to read and write is scorned by her own community. Splendidly short in black and white, Papusza effectively captures the Roma’s complex moral structures and Poland’s bleak landscape.
The Best Actor prize went to Olafur Darri Olafsson, the perpetually drunk anti-hero of XL by Icelandic director Marteinn Thorsson. Olaffson gave a gutsy performance as an alcoholic deputy with severe hangovers, looking incessantly for sex. Four actresses shared the Best Actress award for their roles in Bluebird, a tale of unresolved moral dilemmas in American director Lance Edmund’s Bluebird.
The strange presence of an interloper makes an otherwise happy wedding go awry in Libanky (Honeymoon), a Czech-Slovak co-production. It brought its Czech director Jan Hrebejk the Best Director Award. Honeymoon examined the unresolved personal dilemmas unleashed by an interloper on a happy wedding day.
The FIPRESCI winner Styd (Shame), a Russian film by Yusup Razykov, was loosely inspired by the story of a submarine accident in the Barents Sea, which took the lives of 118 crewmen — a tragedy that shook Russia to the core in 2000. Against a gorgeous if chilling landscape in the country’s far north, the wives of these sailors wait in desperation for their husbands to return, facing, in the bargain, a bureaucracy that will not candidly admit to the accident.
The only Indian film to be screened at Karlovy Vary was Ritesh Batra’s Dabba which, from all accounts, was hugely enjoyed for its “elegant, funny and optimistic” qualities.
Most delightful were the festival’s specially commissioned “trailers”. These 1-2-minute-long provocative b/w films took good-humoured swipes at their own Crystal Globe. Cinema’s well-known names — Helen Mirren, Milos Foreman, Jiri Menzel, John Malkovich — are shown handling the graceful award as a medicine grinder, a telephone smasher, a foot-crushing object, a looking glass for naughty eyes or quite simply as a piece of nothing to be stowed away.
With its highly-regarded programming, quality facilities, and unique atmosphere, Karlovy Vary IFF has become the key annual event for buyers, distributors, festival programmers, sales agents and journalists. But there’s more to the festival than films. Sidebar events were too tempting to resist for the townsfolk: art, poster and other exhibitions, quizzes, screenings, concerts, and much else. It certainly looked as if the entire town, nay region, had turned up to taste the beer, cheer Travolta, soak in the sun and, yes, watch films too.