The 57th edition, which will run from June 30-July 8, has selected nine Iranian films to screen this year.
The 57th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) will celebrate independent Iranian cinema with a selection of singular works made in the past four years.
In a statement, the festival said: “Collectively these works offer an insightful testimony of the burning creativity of Iran’s artists in the face of the challenging reality. Nine mostly young filmmakers – urgent, unheard voices – who palpably bear a spiritual connection to the previous generations of their country’s greats, tackle the current reality with a remarkable sensitivity and great inventiveness. Melancholic dramas, comedies, war movies, sci-fis…films about love, and films within films. Together, these nine unique and intensely personal testimonies form a multi-dimensional mosaic that reflect the collective spirit and openness of Iran’s young cinema of today.”
The retrospective’s curator Lorenzo Esposito added: “This cinema should not be read with the regular tools we use to decode most films. This cinema compels us to reinvent our tools, to reinvent how we see and interpret film, in order to engage with the intentions of these filmmakers. As the title of a poetry collection by Forough Farrokhzad read: ‘We present here and now another birth of Iranian cinema’.”
The nine Iranian films will be No End, The Locust, Zapata, The Skin, Dream’s Gate, A Trip to the Moon, Black and White River, Creation Between Two Surfaces and K9.
Nader Saeivar’s Kafkaesque nightmare No End, co-scripted and co-edited by Jafar Panahi, explores, with vivid realism, the control and humiliation of the individuals by their authoritarian regimes.
The Skin, the debut from the Ark brothers, is a fantasy horror flick blending genre elements with local folk legends.
Negin Ahmadi is the young director and protagonist of Dream’s Gate, a soul-searching documentary that leaves Tehran to follow the lives of an all-female militia group fighting in Syrian Kurdistan.
Produced by the filmmaking collective Kamja, A Trip to the Moon by Mohammadreza Shajan-Nejad follows the zany exploits of a man venturing to recover the sounds left to him by his partner in a bottle before leaving on a trip to the Moon.
Black and White River by Farzin Mohammadi tells the story of the artistic crisis facing young filmmaker Amin, who is trying to recover lost time.
Creation Between Two Surfaces, the second film by photographer and filmmaker Hossein Rajabian, is inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, the director gradually transforms film reality into a psychiatric nightmare.
Vahid Vakilifar’s K9 offers an intoxicating, visionary sci-fi, which, in spite of the darkness consuming the world, remains a believer in the power of light.
