A “neglected” Italian legend, a key figure in contemporary Indian cinema, and the complete work of a renowned British visual artist and filmmaker are to feature at the next Karlovy Vary film festival.

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is to pay tribute to three diverse filmmakers - Ben Rivers, Anurag Kashyap and Elio Petri - at it 49th edition, which runs July 4-12.

A year after introducing its Imagina sidebar, which focuses on movies veering from common narrative and stylistic patterns, the new festival section will offer a complete profile of British director and artist Ben Rivers, who will attend KVIFF.

Rivers, whose work straddles documentary and parable, shoots in 16mm and often centres on social outsiders. Although the director focuses mainly on short films, his most well-received feature to date is A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013), on which Rivers cooperated with director Ben Russell and musician Robert A. A. Lowe (known as Lichens).

KVIFF will also pay tribute to Indian director, screenwriter, and producer Anurag Kashyap, who screened his ambitious gangster saga Gangs of Wasseypur at Cannes 2012. He returned to Cannes last year with his writer-director effort Ugly and The Lunchbox, which he coproduced and went on to become a box office smash.

Among the seven movies that Kashyap will personally introduce to audiences this year at Karlovy Vary are Dev.D (2009), Gulaal (2009) and That Girl in Yellow Boots (2010).

KVIFF will continue its tradition of introducing writer-directors whose work is virtually unknown to domestic audiences with a comprehensive retrospective of postwar Italian filmmaker Elio Petri.

The self-taught filmmaker, who died in 1982, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with The Working Class Goes to Heaven in 1971 and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1970 with Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, 1969.

However, Petri was marginalized until recently as a result of his pointed, uncompromising views of contemporary politics, morality, and art. “Bringing Petri’s films to Karlovy Vary is a dream come true, and it was made possible with the collaboration of Paola Petri and Cineteca di Bologna,” said KVIFF artistic director Karel Och.