Karlovy Vary: Last News

Jessica Kiang At a festival the size and stature of the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary, new discoveries are a daily occurrence. But it is rare that at festival’s end, one of the most excitingly buzzy emergent names should be that of a filmmaker who died 27 years ago and who has languished in relative obscurity – certainly in the Anglophone world – ever since. And yet here we are, at the tail end of an 11-film Yasuzo Masumura retrospective – the biggest of its kind ever mounted at an international film festival – that has proved, in a word, revelatory.  It’s not just in terms of blowing the dust from this extraordinary, unjustly overlooked filmmaker’s catalog, but also in the broader sense of being an exemplary model for how to connect a vibrant, youthful regional audience to global film history. There is a classic film fan born every minute, but in Karlovy Vary this year, you could feel it happen in real time during the screenings of Masumura’s  “A Cheerful Girl” (1957), “Hoodlum Soldier” (1965), “Spider Tattoo” (1966) and so on.  

Naman Ramachandran A series adaptation of Tawada Yoko’s award-winning novel “The Last Children of Tokyo” is being developed as an international co-production between Japan’s NHK and Taiwan’s Betula Films and Flash Forward Entertainment, with principal photography targeted for spring 2026. The project, directed by Edmund Yeo, who won best director at the Tokyo International Film Festival for “We, the Dead,” takes place in a dystopian Japan where the elderly have stopped ageing, but children face early mortality.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The 32-strong official selection of the 58th edition of Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Central and Eastern Europe’s leading cinema fete, will feature 15 directorial debuts as well as the latest works of established filmmakers such as Mark Cousins, Oleh Sentsov, Noaz Deshe, Antonin Peretjatko, Beata Parkanova and Burak Cevik. Karel Och, artistic director of Karlovy Vary, said Tuesday that he’d identified a number of themes and genre in the selection, which included “a freshly revisionist take on the esthetical canons of a period film; a balanced, caring but also provocative look on the fate of a woman in the contemporary society in any moment of her life; and the immediate influence of political events on the life of an individual human being anywhere in the world.” The festival, which runs June 28-July 6 in the Czech Republic, has also revealed the juries of the Crystal Globe and Proxima competitions.

Alissa Simon Film CriticDo you ever think about the narrative that governs your everyday life? You certainly will after watching the idiosyncratic German tragicomedy “The Ordinaries,” which fizzes with remake potential. For her debut feature, premiering in the main competition at Karlovy Vary, German director-writer Sophie Linnenbaum and her co-scripter Michael Fetter Nathansky create a high-concept, meta-cinema world that uses the process of filmmaking to deconstruct the power of the narratives and how they determine our thoughts and actions.The basic idea for this world came early on to Linnenbaum, with the short “[Out of Fra]me” (2016), made while she attended Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf.

As the 56th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) is about to kick off on Friday, there will be plenty to discuss at this year’s event in the picturesque Czech spa town. The prominent Central European festival, which is returning to its usual early July slot after last year’s edition was delayed to August because of the pandemic, will see 33 films from five continents screen across its three sections – the Crystal Globe Competition, the Special Screenings section and its new competition, Proxima, which replaces the former East of the West section.