The Czech Republic’s acclaimed Karlovy Vary International Film Festival kicks off its 49th edition today, Friday, July 4, and runs through Saturday, July 12. One of Europe’s signature cinema events, the A-list festival offers nearly 250 selections, though, by my count, this year’s line-up includes a noticeably reduced number of documentary features among that number –
fewer than 30 vs the nearly 40 of last year’s edition. The following offers highlights from the nonfiction programming:
Among the ten features in the Documentary Competition are: Miro Remo’s COMEBACK, a portrait of two seemingly hopeless Slovak prisoners; Jana Ševčíková’s LEAN A LADDER AGAINST HEAVEN, about a man who selflessly tends to society’s outcasts; Arami Ullón’s CLOUDY TIMES, in which the director struggles with tending to her incapacitated mother’s needs or to her own desires; and Federico Ferrone and Michele Manzolini’s THE TRAIN TO MOSCOW: A JOURNEY TO UTOPIA (pictured), an archival record of disillusionment set against Moscow’s 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students.
Screening Out of Competition are eight additional documentaries, including: Pavel Štingl’s EUGENIC MINDS, an essay exploring the use of the pseudoscience; Andreas Horvath’s EARTH’S GOLDEN PLAYGROUND, a modern-day look at the vestiges of North American gold fever; and Sergei Loznitsa’s MAIDAN (pictured), an on-the-ground chronicle of the Ukrainian uprising.
Additional recent nonfiction appears scattered amongst other strands, including Out of the Past’s Roger Ebert profile, LIFE ITSELF by Steve James, and BERTOLUCCI ON BERTOLUCCI by Walter Fasano and Luca Guadagnino; Another View’s Nick Cave hybrid portrait, 20,000 DAYS ON EARTH by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, and filmed letters between Mark Cousins and Mania Akbari, LIFE MAY BE; Imagina’s exploration of Boris Karloff, A MASQUE OF MADNESS (pictured) by Norbert Pfaffenbichler, and work-focused hybrid project JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING by Denis Côté; Special Events’ concert film BJÖRK: BIOPHILIA LIVE by Peter Strickland and Nick Fenton; and a 24-film Tribute to experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers, which includes three feature-length projects.
what (not) to doc 