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Marko Škop and a two-time Sundance winner heading to Karlovy Vary

June 11, 2009, 9:29 AM

This year’s selection of feature-length documentaries in competition to present an internet visionary, a southern Italian mafioso, the greatest boxing match of all time and a new film by KVIFF 2006 winner Juan Carlos Rulfo.

For the difficult process of selecting among hundreds of entered films, the program department of the KVIFF documentary competition looks for a balanced approach between content and form. Its penchant for staging, stylization, and other expressive feature-film means is often a thorn in the side of purists who complain of the “hybridization” of their favorite type of film. Neither this year will the stress be on sovereign writer-director documentaries, the best proof of which is The Sound of Insects - Record of a Mummy, a film by Switzerland’s Peter Liechti. Adapted to the screen via a Japanese novel treating a shocking event, the director tells the true story of a man who took down detailed diary notes of the progress of his own suicide by starvation.

Winner of the 2006 KVIFF Audience Award, documentarist Marko Škop returns to the festival for the world premiere of his new film Osadné. The cheerful “document-toury movie” follows a trio of local patriots from a remote eastern Slovakian village to the European Parliament in Brussels.

Prominent American director Ondi Timoner, two-time winner of the Sundance festival, has chosen Karlovy Vary for the European premiere of We Live in Public. Her film presents an eccentric visionary and promoter of communications networks named Josh Harris: “The greatest internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.”

For forty years Luc Moullet, a colleague of Godard and Truffaut at the then fledgling magazine Cahiers du cinéma, has shot films in a wide variety genres and styles whose common denominator is his passion for the comic. The same holds true in the case of his playful Land of Madness (La terre de la folie), in which he travels to the foot of the southern French Alps to analyze the frequent incidence of mental disorders and their attendant murders and suicides.

Thriller in Manila, a gripping reconstruction of the legendary 1975 boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier for the world heavyweight title, will compete for Best Documentary against Italy’s Diary of an Affiliate (Diario di uno "Scuro"), a stylized portrait of a boss of the Sacra Corona Unita crime organization. Codirected by Juan Carlos Rulfo, whose In the Pit won at the 2006 KVIFF, Those Who Remain (Los que se quedan) tells the story of Mexican emigration to the US from an original perspective.

Austrian director Sebastian Brameshuber investigates the dramatic competition for Turkey’s best crier of the faithful to prayer. The Karlovy Vary festival will present his feature-length debut Muezzin as a world premiere. The Spanish director of Anas: An Indian Film, Enric Miró, will offer festival audiences an original documentary essay set against the backdrop of Palestinian realities.

Our ten noteworthy documentaries will be rounded out by Act of God, the latest from Jennifer Baichwal, the renowned Canadian director of Manufactured Landscapes. Her film features seven stories from around the world linked by the phenomenon of being struck by lightning. The director asks the likes of Paul Auster and Cuban followers of Shango, the god of lightning, whether it is mere chance or a higher power.

Documentary Films in Competition

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