Some of the biggest films from this year’s Berlin, Cannes, and Venice film festivals are coming to Prague cinemas beginning tonight during this year’s Be2Can Film Festival.
The festivities start tonight with a screening of the 2018 Cannes Palme D’Or-winning drama Shoplifters at Kino Lucerna from 18:30.
A drama about a small-time family of crooks subsisting on the streets of Tokyo, Shoplifters was directed by Hirokazu Koreeda (Nobody Knows, Still Walking), whose previous film The Third Murder was a highlight for me at this year’s Febiofest in Prague.
If you miss Shoplifters tonight, don’t worry: it will be screening again at Kino Lucerna on Sunday, with additional screenings at Prague cinemas Kino Atlas and Kino Pilotů. Lucerna, Pilotů, Atlas, and Kino Evald make for the primary locations of this year’s Be2Can Film Fest in Prague.
But the festival has also spread throughout other cities across the Czech Republic (and Slovakia) in 2018: over the next week, films can be seen at arthouse cinemas in Brno, Plzeň, Ostrava, Jihlava, Zlín, Olomouc, and a dozen other cities across the Czech Republic.
Among the other highlights at the 2018 Be2Can Film Fest is Mug (pictured above), a comedy-drama from Małgorzata Szumowska about Poland’s first face transplant recipient that won the Silver Bear at the 2018 Berlin Film Festival.
Also screening is the hotly-anticipated L.A. noir Under the Silver Lake, from It Follows director David Robert Mitchell. Under the Silver Lake stars Andrew Garfield, Topher Grace, and Riley Keough, and opened to mixed – but some ecstatic – reviews at Cannes in May.
Other films featured at this year’s Be2Can fest include Son of Saul director László Nemes’ second feature, Sunset, the Romy Schneider biopic 3 Days in Quiberon, and U – July 22, a Norwegian drama about the 2011 massacre on the island of Utøya near Oslo.
Hits from previous years’ festival will also be on display at Kino Lucerna during the festival, including three of my very favorite films from 2017: Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, and Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul.
For non-Czech-speaking film fans in Prague, the Be2Can Film Fest also offers a great opportunity to catch some of the year’s top festival films with English subtitles; while most films will screen with English subs, however, check the Be2Can festival website to confirm.
If you miss this year’s Be2Can festival in Prague, be on the lookout for future releases: Be2Can Distribution will be bringing many of the films shown at the 2018 festival throughout the Czech Republic later this year and in 2019.
More information about the 2018 Be2Can Film Festival can be found via the official festival website and Facebook page.
