KVIFF at 60: Karel Och on Legacy, Global Lineup, U.S.
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- Karlovy Vary International Film Festival celebrates its 60th edition and 80-year legacy with a program artistic director Karel Och said was designed "in a spirit of humility" to honor predecessors, with the Out of the Past sidebar screening Ken Loach's "Kes" (a 1970 winner), Glauber Rocha's "Barravento" (1961), and Powell & Pressburger's "A Matter of Life and Death."
- Proxima, the unrestricted section that replaced East of the West in 2022, has broadened Asian and Latin American representation, with this year's lineup featuring films from India ("The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb"), Japan ("Incinerator"), Argentina ("Truck Driver"), and Mexico ("Against Nature").
- Och publicly criticized U.S. indie holdback strategies, saying festival-acquired Czech distribution title "Josephine" was blocked from summer screenings — "an extremely frustrating tendency which is seriously harming the summer festivals as the launching pads for local distribution."
- Repeat filmmakers anchor the Crystal Globe competition, including Mark Cousins (2024 Crystal Globe winner) bringing episodes 7-8 of "The Story of Documentary Film" and Bulgarian duo Grozeva and Valchanov returning with "Black Money for White Nights" after their 2019 top-prize win.
- MENA support continues with Lebanese director Karim Kassem's genre hybrid "Pipes" and "Hijamat," produced and edited by Jafar Panahi and directed by his frequent co-writer Nader Saeivar, alongside first-ever competition entries from Colombia, Myanmar, and Switzerland.
- Och's personal program highlight is Czech filmmaker Ivan Ostrosky's "Only Beautiful Things to Look At," which he called "a very, very beautiful film" about "a very dark part of recent Czechoslovak history" that he predicted will have a strong international career.
Why it matters: KVIFF at 60 is using the milestone to reassert the European festival circuit's role as a global discovery pipeline, but Och's specific complaint about "Josephine" — acquired for Czech distribution yet blocked from summer screenings under U.S. holdback terms — exposes a structural collision between American indie release strategies and the launching-pad function that mid-sized European festivals like Karlovy Vary depend on for local theatrical revenue.
