Dirty Work: A dispatch from the 59^th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Despite its first edition taking place in 1946, it was Miloš Forman who really put the Czech spa town Karlovy Vary’s annual film festival on the map. The legendary Czech-American director was a longtime friend to and ambassador for the festival, helping them to secure a roster of impressive international guests from Hollywood and beyond and visiting himself several times. In 1997 he was recognised with KVIFF’s top honour, the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema, and in 2009 he returned to show the filmed version of his Czech-language musical, A Walk Worthwhile. Forman’s impact was felt at this year’s festival, as his friend and collaborator Michael Douglas flew in to introduce the restoration of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 

This sort of celebrity star power is now routine for the festival, with A‑Listers such as Russell Crowe, Willem Dafoe and Julianne Moore all popping in to receive that coveted top honour. This usually comes with a stay in the majestic Grandhotel Pupp (one of the inspirations for the titular building in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel) and some sort of glitzy banquet – in this regard Karlovy Vary is similar to its festival calendar neighbours San Sebastián and Locarno, as much about promoting the gorgeous locale as celebrating cinema. This year it was Stellan Skarsgård and Dakota Johnson who attracted leagues of photographers and starstruck fans on the red carpet, promoting Sentimental Value and Splitsville respectively, fresh from buzzy Cannes premieres. Both also received awards from the festival. What Forman knew, and in turn brought to the festival, was that on the international film festival circuit, celebrity draws eyes – and eyes mean money. Money, in turn, means the ability to secure a festival for 79 years and counting. (This doesn’t excuse honouring Johnny Depp with the Crystal Globe in 2021, but it does explain it.)

Celebrity also plays a role in one of my favourite viewings at this year’s festival: Alexandre O. Philippe’s Chain Reactions, which premiered at Venice last autumn. Philippe has carved out a comfortable documentary niche for himself producing reflective works like Lynch/​Oz and Memory: The Origins of Alien with varying degrees of success, but his take on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a high point, framing Hooper’s film through the insights of five pop culture figures for whom it was a formative viewing experience. The chapters built around Patton Oswalt, Takeshi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King and Karyn Kusama vary in length and content – Miike’s links both wider Japanese cinema and his own work to Hooper’s through snappy editing and an extended anecdote about how Miike first encountered the film while trying to buy a ticket to see Chaplin’s City Lights – but Oswalt’s was the most engaging, blending his charismatic storytelling sensibilities with some colourful theories (the sun is driving everyone insane!). He touches on a point that echoed in my mind: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s negotiation of labour, specifically disenfranchised blue collar employees versus hippie college kids slumming it on a road trip. The family of cannibals they disturb in their dilapidated home represent a vanishing population, and they violently resist their termination. ​“The family in Texas Chain Saw are doing the most extreme, disturbing version of how life operates,” Oswalt suggests. ​“It’s not you dying and feeding trees, it’s someone hanging you on a meat hook so they can cut steaks off of you and serve them to their family, so their family can survive.” 

Speaking of survival, Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding sees Josh O’Connor giddy up as a displaced cowboy who loses his home in a Colorado wildfire – an increasingly prescient topic given new attention following the devastation caused in Los Angeles at the start of this year. Curiously Walker-Silverman’s film feels like the Hollywood version of this story; O’Connor is handsome and winsome as Dusty (yes, Dusty) but there’s a strange cosiness to Rebuilding that makes the FEMA camp he ends up in look more like a choice than a last resort. It’s evident that Walker-Silverman wanted to focus on community rather than the trauma people face when displaced by wildfires, but the film feels timid as a result, failing to reckon with the reality that these fires disproportionately impact the poorest communities, particularly minorities. We see that some of Dusty’s new neighbours are non-white, but the film still chooses his story as its focal point, centring a familiar, broad experience even in trying circumstances. 

The role of labour plays into Ondřej Provazník’s Broken Voices in a more compelling manner, as a gifted 13-year-old singer joins a world-famous girls’ choir alongside her older sister only to find herself loneliness than ever before. Karolína’s (Kateřina Falbrová) natural talent draws the admiration and attention of the group’s beloved choirmaster and in turn the ire of her peers – lacking companionship, she becomes worryingly close to only person who shows her any positive attention. As Karolína pushes herself to her physical and mental limits, she’s also forced to grow up quickly; Broken Voices isn’t necessarily a film about child stardom, but it does come to mind as one watches Falbrová’s excellent performance, particularly since Provazník’s screenplay is based on the case of Bohumil Kulínský, whom founded Czechoslovakia’s Bambini di Praga choir and was later convicted for abusing 49 girls between 1984 and 2004. There have been no shortage of ripped-from-the-headlines sexual assault dramas since the advent of MeToo, but there’s an effective understatedness about Provazník’s film, which also touches on the dissolution of the Czechoslovakian state in 1992 and creeping American influence on Czech popular culture following the fall of the USSR.

The intersection of labour and ​“love” could similarly be found in Nina Knag’s Don’t Call Me Mama, where Eva (Pia Tjelta), a likeable high school teacher, begins volunteering at a refugee centre in support of her philandering husband’s mayoral reelection campaign. She subsequently grows close to 18-year-old refugee Amir (Tarek Zayat), and invites him to move into the guest room of their home; what seems like a selfless action is in fact a boon for her ambitious husband, seen as an act of generosity, but for Eva the impact is more visceral. As she takes it upon herself to help the aspiring poet achieve his dreams, a physical relationship develops with (perhaps predictably) devastating consequences. Tjelta picked up the festival’s Best Actress award for her performance, which is well-earned in a tricky role; despite the slightly cringe title, Knag’s debut feature is a pleasingly knotty one that doesn’t descend into a morality play.

But the antithesis of the celebrity of KVIFF seems visible in Steffen Goldkamp’s Rain Fell On the Nothing New, in which a young man leaves juvenile detention hoping for a new start and instead finds himself unable to escape the past. Caught between alienating bureaucracy and a life of crime, David (Noah Sayenko) doesn’t see much of a future – he has a criminal record and the relentlessly rule-following German society aren’t too keen on second chances. It’s a precise and rigorous film, buoyed by Sayenko’s performance, pointing out the hypocrisy present in many justice systems whereby youth offenders are almost incentivised into becoming career criminals by the lack of rehabilitation offered to them. Goldkamp’s film premiered in the festival’s Proxima competition – a frequent highlight of the programme, and proof that beyond the necessary sparkle that comes with big names, the thoughtful and talented programmers of Karlovy Vary have excellent instincts for the stories that matter. While there’s a definite juxtaposition between the ritzy crowdpleasers and more thought-provoking affair, perhaps those are just the rules of the game.