The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival has unveiled its official look for this year’s 57th edition, which will be held from June 30 through July 8, 2023 in the historic Czech spa town. After the busy look of last year’s edition, this year’s design is decidedly minimalistic.
The visuals have been designed by longtime collaborators Jakub Spurný and Aleš Najbrt from Prague-based Studio Najbrt, which has been working with the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival since the 1990s.
“After last year’s illustrated poster, the visuals for the 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival have been composed using four colored lines that act out an experimental game with legibility and motion involving the number 57,” Spurný and Najbrt say in a press release.
“This approach enables a number of additional variations, both static and animated. With a crack of the whip, we can begin!”
Alongside the design for this year’s festival, organizers have also made a few announcements regarding the programming at this year’s festival. As part the 57th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, visitors can look forward to seeing tributes to Japanese filmmaker Yasuzo Masumura and contemporary Iranian cinema.
“Masumura has proven that mainstream cinema can be as bold, as political, as perceptive, as its arthouse counterpart,” Joseph Fahim, curator of the Masumura tribute, stated in a press release.
“Constantly breaking barriers and blurring boundaries between art and commerce, the films of Yasuzo Masumura are no less revolutionary than the best of Samuel Fuller, Nicolas Ray or Frank Tashlin. This retrospective, held in anticipation of his 100th anniversary next year, aims to not only introduce audiences from around the world to Masumura’s wild cinema, but to cement his growing reputation as one of Japan’s great film masters.”
A total of 11 of Masumura’s classic films from the 1950s and 1960s will be screened as part of this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
Nine Iranian films made over the past four years will also be screened at this year’s festival, and include works from some of the country’s young rising filmmakers.
“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,“ says Lorenzo Esposito, curator of the tribute to Iranian cinema.
“As the title of a poetry collection by Forough Farrokhzad read: “We present here and now another birth of Iranian cinema.”
Also presented at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will be a newly-restored version of the classic Czechoslovak film Courage for Every Day (Každý den odvahu), the 1964 feature debut from director Evald Schorm. The film won the Grand Prix at the 1966 Locarno International Film Festival and was a key early work in the burgeoning Czech New Wave of the 1960s.
Courage for Every Day was digitally restored this year by Prague-based studios UPP and Soundsquare in collaboration with the Czech National Film Archive, and will be screened at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival as part of the KVIFF Classics project.
The first of many guests to be awarded at this year’s festival has also been revealed: Daniela Kolářová, who starred alongside Zdeněk Svěrák in films such as Jiří Menzel’s Secluded, Near Woods (Na samotě u lesa) and Jan Svěrák’s Empties (Vratné lahve).
Kolářová will be awarded the KVIFF President’s Award during the closing ceremony of this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and the classic comedy Ball Lightning (Kulovy Blesk), in which she also stars alongside Svěrák, will be screened during the festival.
