Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Celebrates Top Directors for 2024 Edition

Opening night at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival often lures a top talent to accept the KVIFF President’s Award, in this case Viggo Mortensen, the writer/director/star of his sophomore film, western “The Dead Don’t Hurt,” co-starring Vicky Krieps, which will open in the Czech Republic on July 4.

Every year, KVIFF presents a new short film at the opening night ceremony, to serve as a trailer of sorts for the festival. The main protagonist is Oscar-winning actor and producer Benicio del Toro (“Traffic”), recipient of the KVIFF President’s Award in 2022. The short film was written and directed by long-time creator of KVIFF trailers Ivan Zachariáš. Del Toro took time off while shooting Wes Anderson’s new film in Berlin to work with Zachariáš, who collaborated on the trailer with cinematographer Jan Velický and editor Filip Malásek, and composed the music.

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“We are glad that Benicio del Toro could join the friends of KVIFF who have supported the festival by appearing in our trailer. He thus joins the likes of Casey Affleck, Miloš Forman, Jude Law, Mel Gibson, and Helen Mirren, who have all performed in festival trailers,” said KVIFF’s Executive Director Kryštof Mucha. “It’s not always easy in terms of organization, but the result is a unique series of trailers featuring world-famous personalities that has no equal at any other international festival.”

This year’s 58th KVIFF will also host Oscar-winning director and producer Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic”), who will present two of his films, “Kafka,” filmed in Prague, starring Jeremy Irons, and “Mr. Kneff,” his 20-minutes shorter re-edited version of the 1991 film, partly colorized with a new soundtrack, which are being shown as part of the festival’s “Kafka” retrospective, The Wish to Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinema.

British actor Clive Owen will be a special guest of this year’s festival, and will accept his KVIFF President’s Award at the closing ceremony, where his film “Closer” will be shown. Also nabbing a President’s Award is German actor, director, producer, and multiple European Film Award-winner Daniel Brühl (“Inglourious Basterds”), who will present his directorial debut “Next Door.”

The Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director Nicole Holofcener (writer of “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”) will attend KVIFF to introduce three films from her award-winning career: “Please Give” (2010) stars Oliver Platt and Holofcener’s regular collaborator Catherine Keener; romantic comedy “Enough Said” (2013), stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini; and marriage comedy “You Hurt My Feelings” (2023), also stars Louis-Dreyfus.

Also attending with their latest films are Michel Franco (“Memory”), Juho Kuosmanen (three short films “The SIlent Trilogy”), Sergei Loznitsa (documentary “The Invasion”), Rúnar Rúnarsson (Cannes entry “When the Light Breaks”), Daniele Luchetti (“Trust”) and Ti West (A24’s “MaXXXine,” the final instalment in his X trilogy).

European Film Promotion and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will offer an extended industry programme for the ten participants selected for EFP Future Frames. This year’s mentor, Mexico’s Michel Franco, will hold an exclusive master class on July 2. The program provides a comprehensive experience for emerging filmmakers; after two intensive online meeting and pitching days, the participants will take part in an extensive on-site industry programme from June 30 to July 2 at KVIFF, including exclusive meetings with the festival programming team and individual meetings with four representatives from UTA and Range Media Partners. They will also subsequently select one Future Frames director for a scholarship and study trip to Los Angeles. In an exclusive master class, Franco will focus on one of his early films, 2012 Cannes entry “After Lucia,” and explore it with the ten emerging directors.

The 2024 Future Frames Selection
Austria: Matthias Krepp | “Strangers in the Night”
Belgium: Marthe Peters | “Baldilocks”
Czech Republic: Marie-Magdalena Kochová | “3 MWh”
Denmark: William Sehested Høeg | “The Complaint”
Germany: Hilke Rönnfeldt | “A Study of Empathy”
Iceland: Anna Maria Joakimsdottir-Hutri | “Who Stands Up for Alvar”
Italy: Emanuela Muzzupappa | “Love’s Servant”
Romania: Bogdan Alecsandru | “If I Float”
Slovakia: Katarína Gramatová | “A Good Mind Grows in Thorny Places”
Spain: Lucía G. Romero | “Cura Sana”

A unique exhibition of photographs by Czech-Slovak photographer Tono Stano presents well-known as well as previously unseen photographs of important KVIFF guests taken over many years. Some of the famous people captured in Stano’s photographs include Morgan Freeman, Uma Thurman, Willem Dafoe, Jude Law, Woody Harrelson, John Malkovich, Scarlett Johansson, and Sharon Stone, among others. The exhibition will be open to the public for the duration of the film festival at the Sparkasse Gallery in Karlovy Vary (Divadelní 243/1).

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