The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival has unveiled the official selection for its 60th edition, including new films by Nader Saeivar, Valeria Sarmiento, and Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov.
Scroll down for full lineup
The festival, which runs from July 3-11 in the Czech spa town, has programmed 40 films across its Crystal Globe Competition, Proxima Competition and Special Screenings section.
The festival’s main Crystal Globe Competition has 12 titles, all of them world premieres. They include Hijamat by Iranian writer and director Nader Saeivar, who received an Oscar nomination this year as a co-writer of Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident. Hijamat is his fourth feature as a director and he again collaborated with Panahí, who contributed as producer and editor. The film is about fifty-year-old Murad whose life is shaken to the core when he learns that his younger brother is gay.
Valeria Sarmiento, whose films have played in competition at Berlin, San Sebastian and Locarno, world premieres Behind The Rain, about a woman who returns to her hometown where her memories of childhood sexual abuse are awakened.
Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov, who won the 2019 Crystal Globe for The Father, will premiere tragi-comedy Black Money For White Nights about a couple whose holiday to Russia is disrupted by the invasion of Ukraine.
The lineup also includes Serbian Miroslav Terzić’s 3 Weeks After, set within the vulnerable world of adolescents on a class trip to Bulgaria. Terzić’s Stitches previously played in Berlin’s Panorama section in 2019.
Czech director Šimon Holý returns to Karlovy Vary with international co-production Chica Checa, about a widowed village mail carrier who tries to fulfill the last wish of her ailing mother. A series of unexpected events brings her closer to her son and awakens in her a longing for a different life.
The Crystal Globe jury will comprise film critic Justin Chang, Malaysian filmmaker Amanda Nell Eu, Czech sound designer, producer and composer Pavel Rejholec, producer Nadia Turincev and Norwegian filmmaker Eskil Vogt.
Karel Och, artistic director of Karlovy Vary, said: ”One of the defining characteristics of the films in this year’s main program is the directors’ impressive effort to comprehend the diversity and complexity of the world through firsthand confrontation, and through a relentless search for the relationship between the artistic and the political, the intimate and the societal.”
Crystal Globe competition
3 Weeks After (Srb-Bgr)
Dir: Miroslav Terzić
Black Money for White Nights (Bgr-Grc)
Dir: Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov
Chica Checa (Cz-Fra-Svk)
Dir: Šimon Holý
Five Years, Four Months (Col-US)
Dir: Esteban Hoyos García, Juan Miguel Gelacio Ramírez
Behind the Rain (Chile)
Dir: Valeria Sarmiento
The Guest (Dnk)
Dir: Mads Mengel
A Happy Family (Switz)
Dir: Jan-Eric Mack
Hijamat (Ger)
Dir: Nader Saeivar
The Lion at My Back (Cyp-Lux-Grc)
Dir: Tonia Mishiali
Pipes (Lbn)
Dir: Karim Kassem
Only Beautiful Things to Look At (Svk-Cz-Hun)
Dir: Ivan Ostrochovský
Fruit Gathering (Mmr-Fr-Cz)
Dir: Aung Phyoe
Proxima Competition
33 Steps (Svk-Cz)
Dir: Anna Domček, Šimon Domček
Truck Driver (Sp-Arg)
Dir: Francisco Marise
Against Nature (Mex)
Dir: Axel Bertha
A Whole Person Almost (Gr-Bul-Ger-Cyp-Rou)
Dir: Efthimis Kosemund-Sanidis
Homo Sive Natura (It)
Dir: Giovanni C. Lorusso
The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb (Ind)
Dir: Yashasvi Juyal
My Friend the Porn Star (Aut)
Dir: Rosa Friedrich
Lover, Not a Fighter (Svk)
Dir: Martina Buchelová
Paris Paris (Bel)
Dir: Isabelle Tollenaere
Rain Catcher (It-UK)
Dir: Michele Fiascaris
Incinerator (Jpn)
Dir: Shuntaro Uchida
Petty Thieves (Cro-Ger-Fr)
Dir: Mate Ugrin
Special Screenings
Bára - Diary of a Rockstar (Cz)
Dir: Helena Třeštíková
A Pint of Ink (Cz-Svk)
Dir: Ester Geislerová
If Pigeons Turned to Gold (Cz-Svk)
Dir: Pepa Lubojacki
The Friend’s House is Here (Irn-US)
Dir: Maryam Ataei, Hossein Keshavarz
Learning To Breathe Under Water (UK-Neth-Ire)
Dir: Rebekah Fortune
City of Fathers (Cz-Svk-Pol)
Dir: Zdeněk Tyc
Everything As It Should Be (Cz)
Dir: Bohdan Karásek
Morten (Est-Lith)
Dir: Ivan Pavljutskov
Robert Richardson: The White Devil (Cz-US)
Dir: Jana Hojdová
The Story of Documentary Film - 1980s (UK)
Dir: Mark Cousins
To Die to Live (Ukr-Lva-Svk)
Dir: Yuliia Hontaruk
Gregorius, the Chosen One (Cz-Pol-Rom)
Dir: Tomasz Mielnik
A Report for Minerva 2 (Cz)
Dir: Miroslav Krobot, Lubomír Smékal
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