'Lover, Not a Fighter' Wins Proxima at Karlovy Vary
SkimNews Take
A debut Slovak rom-com taking Karlovy Vary's Proxima competition signals the festival's debut pipeline is rewarding accessible, light-touch genre work rather than the heavier, more solemn debuts the section was built on.
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- "Lover, Not a Fighter" is the debut feature from Slovakian writer-director Martina Buchelová, a Slovakian-Czech co-production that premiered at the Karlovy Vary film festival to "gales of laughter from local audiences."
- "Lover, Not a Fighter" won Karlovy Vary's Proxima competition — a discovery-oriented prize the source describes as "often given over to more experimental works."
- Adam Kubala stars as Andrej, a 20-year-old slacker who moves in with his grandmother to quit drinking cold turkey, and who retains an oddball habit of climbing trees in public.
- The halting romance centers on Andrej's pursuit of shy Miša, played by Michaela Kostková, complicated by sidebars involving Miša's younger sister and a doomsday-fixated father.
- Buchelová's script "resists the kind of banal generational generalizations" common to GenZ comedies, with "refreshingly little meme-style humor" in favor of "well-written, sometimes squirmingly uncomfortable conversation."
- Jaroslava Pokorná plays Andrej's "loving, good-humored but helpfully no-nonsense grandmother," whose refuge is disrupted when cousin Pet'o (František Beleš) moves in and sparks an "awkward turf war."
Why it matters: Winning Karlovy Vary's Proxima — a competition typically given over to more experimental works — with a crowdpleasing GenZ romantic comedy is unusual, and gives Buchelová's debut atypical festival-circuit visibility for a first Slovak feature.
