Karlovy Vary Film Fest unveils Crystal Globe lineup

PanARMENIAN.Net - “The Wolf from Royal Vineyard Street”, the final feature of Czech filmmaker Jan Nemec, who died in March at the age of 79, will have its world premiere as part of the Official Selection competition at this year’s Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival. The film is one of 12 international features announced on Tuesday that will vie for the Crystal Globe during the fest, which runs July 1-9, Variety said.

Nemec’s film is an adaptation of the celebrated director’s own quasi-autobiographical short stories, resulting in what the fest describes as “a dejected comedy, an unsentimental reminiscence and a nonchalant settling of scores in punk regalia. Both the movie and its maker defy categorization.”

Also in the running is Italian director Roberto Ando’s “The Confessions,” a suspense drama about a charismatic monk (Toni Servillo) who shows up at a meeting of G8 finance ministers on the Baltic coast, where a financier is subsequently murdered.

Hungarian helmer Szabolcs Hajdu offers an intimate study of two families thrown together by circumstance in “It’s Not the Time of My Life.”

Germany’s Sven Taddicken’s “Original Bliss” adapts Scottish author A. L. Kennedy’s novel of the same name about an unhappy married woman whose life is changed when she meets a charismatic psychologist, while Canadian helmer Jesse Klein tells the story of a bullied school boy who runs off with a young stranger in “We’re Still Together.”

Spanish directors Isaki Lacuesta and Isa Campo’s “The Next Skin” follows a teenager who went missing as a child and was presumed dead but returns home after eight years.

In Catalin Mitulescu’s Romanian drama “By the Rails,” a man returns home after spending a year working abroad only to find his wife has changed, while in Jan Hrebejk’s Czech-Slovak “The Teacher,” set in 1983 Czechoslovakia, parents learn that a kind teacher has been allegedly using her students to manipulate their parents.

From Russia, Ivan I. Tverdovsky’s “Zoology” centers on a lonely middle-aged admin employee at a zoo whose life is turned upside down when she discovers she has grown a tail.

Also screening in competition are: “My Father’s Wings,” by Kivanc Sezer (Turkey); “Waves,” by Grzegorz Zariczny (Poland); and “Nightlife,” by director Damjan Kozole (Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina).