Checking in on the Karlovy Vary International Film Fest

One of these days, maybe we'll send someone (preferably someone who likes international travel and long plane flights a lot more than I do) to the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechslovokia. Mark Rabinowitz has been covering the fest for indieWIRE, and has a nice ittle write-up about managing to score entry into the hottest nightspot in town, Becher's Bar, a small, exclusive hangout usually limited only to those who write for Variety or are otherwise connected. Rabinowitz managed to get himself escorted to the hot spot by a VIP, and got to experience the vibe of being one of the cool kids first-hand.

Over at Green Cine Daily, David D'Arcy has sent in three excellent dispatches from the fest. In the first, D'Arcy writes about Renee Zellweger having to present an award to Czech animator Bretislav Pojar in jeans and a black shirt, after the white ballgown she was supposed to wear got "lost" in transit. D'Arcy notes that Zellweger did manage to pronounce Pojar's name correctly, and ponders whether the animator even knows the starlet and her own body or work. In his second dispatch a few days later, D'Arcy opines that the likely winner of the fest will be a film called Jar City, a "thriller about genetic codes and DNA determinism by the Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur." If the film does as well as D'Arcy thinks it will, hopefully I'll get a chance to catch it at a fest down the road.

Other films getting buzz at the fest include Conversation with My Gardener by Jean Becker (which D'Arcy found banal) and Saturno contro, helmed by Fernan Ozpetek ("... another would-be bearer of truths ..."). Ouch. D'Arcy liked better a film called Hope, the feature debut from doc director Stanislaw Mucha, about which he says, "Mucha also gets the trajectory of an art crime with as much plausibility as I've seen on the screen, although we can all agree that the bar is not too high."

In his third (and most recent) dispatch, D'Arcy covers the documentary portion of the fest with a favorable write-up on a film called My Dear Republic (if this one doesn't show up at other major fests, I bet it will play Seattle next year -- SIFF has a solid history of covering Eastern Eurpopen films). My Dear Republic is about a man named Friedrich Zawrel, who experienced firsthand the horrors of Spiegelgrund, a "children's prison and research hospital where Nazi doctors carried out experiments on children and practiced euthanasia." Shudder. My paternal grandparents are concentration camp survivors, and I find films about the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis hard to watch, but if I get a chance to see this film, I'll see it based on D'Arcy's recommendations.