Willem Dafoe will be heading to West Bohemia in July to pick up a Crystal Globe for contribution to world cinema at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the org announced Tuesday, while boundary-challenging director-scribe Charlie Kaufman will be taking home the President’s Award.
Fest will screen Dafoe-starrer “Pasolini,” Abel Ferrara’s psychedelic tribute to the avant-garde Italian filmmaker, along with Martin Scorsese’s 1988 movie “The Last Temptation of Christ,” in which Dafoe stars alongside Harvey Keitel. Kaufman’s surreal animated feature “Anomalisa” will also screen.
The event, set in an ornate spa town in the Czech Republic, will open with true-life Nazi assassination drama “Anthropoid,” a Czech-shot thriller featuring seven other fest guests, “Fifty Shades of Grey’s” Jamie Dornan, Toby Jones, Ana Geislerova, Alena Mihulova, Vaclav Neuzil and Marcin Dorocinski, as well as screenwriter and director Sean Ellis.
The film, which turns on the killing of Nazi chief Reinhard Heydrich in Prague 1942 by Czech resistance agents, is an American-French-Czech project kicked off at last year’s Karlovy Vary fest.
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In the fest’s Horizons section, Spanish actresses Adriana Ugarte and Emma Suarez will present Pedro Almodovar’s mother-daughter drama “Julieta,” while Sergi Lopez will join Suarez to screen main competish film “The Next Skin,” a homecoming mystery by Isaki Lacuesta and Isa Campo.
German actor Ulrich Tukur will screen Crystal Globe contender “Original Bliss,” one of 12 films to be adjudicated by a jury also announced today: Italian novelist-screenwriter Maurizio Braucci; cofounder of Soda Pictures Eve Gabereau; Czech actress Martha Issová; Georgian director George Ovashvili; and U.S. producer Jay Van Hoy.
Among the fest’s industry events is a work-in-progress competition, with nine projects from Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Greece and Turkey appearing before a jury of film professionals. The winner will go home with a services-and-cash package worth over $100,000. Filmmakers will present 35 projects at several events focusing on narrative and documentary genres, work from member countries of the Eurimages film funding system, and pitch-and-feedback sessions.
Talks about on-demand platforms, Czech production benefits, international development labs and other training resources will also be held at the fest, which runs July 1-9, at villas and halls of the historic Grandhotel Pupp and the communist-era Thermal hotel.
