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Greek BOY EATING THE BIRD´S FOOD to premiere in Karlovy Vary competition

June 5, 2012, 1:20 PM

Eight world premieres and four international premieres will be competing in the main competition at the Karlovy Vary IFF, which will also be profiling four talented debut directors.

One of the films competing for the Crystal Globe for Best Film will be Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy (Romanzo di una strage) by Italian director Marco Tullio Giordana, a thrilling reconstruction of the notorious and, to date, unsolved terrorist attack in Milan in 1969. Previous films by this respected filmmaker have been presented in competition in Cannes and Venice.

Prominent Polish director Jan Jakub Kolski also has experience from the Venice competition. The hero of his latest film To Kill a Beaver (Zabić bobra) is marked by his war experiences to such an extent that he shuts himself off from the world. Only a girl he has never met before manages to pull him out of his paranoid state.
The Czech representative, Polski film by Marek Najbrt, is highly unusual for its genre, unique not only for the competition section, but also within Central European cinema as a whole. This mischievous reflection on the boundaries of reality and fiction, in which well-known Czech actors play themselves, shows us how to cope with our own fame and with the pitfalls associated with the art of filmmaking.

Directors from countries severely affected by the economic crisis have also opted for unconventional modes of cinematic storytelling. The Bressonesque existential drama by debuting director Ektoras Lygizos Boy Eating the Bird´s Food (To agori troi to fagito tou pouliou) is one of the more radical allegorical films to come out of Greece, a country currently producing some of the most interesting works to figure on the international festival circuit. Portuguese filmmaker Rodrigo Areias elected to transfer the timeless philosophy of American moralist Henry D. Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience to the traditional Western environment in the film Hay Road (Estrada de Palha). While the story is set one hundred years ago, the movie is powerful not only for its bewitching style, but also for its extremely tangible parallels with the present.

The Austrian debut Your Beauty Is Worth Nothing... (Deine Schönheit ist nichts wert...) by Hüseyin Tabak overwhelms not only by its general sensitivity, but also an ability to tell a very serious story through the eyes of a little boy.

Other debut features include the Japanese existential ballad Kamihate Store (Kamihate shoten), and the Mexican film Nos vemos, papá (Nos Vemos Papa), whose director became celebrated as the co-screenwriter for the film Leap Year (2010), which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes for best first feature.

The Karlovy Vary competition this year welcomes back Iranian director and actor Ali Mosaffa, whose new film The Last Step (Peleh akhar) features Leila Hatami (A Separation) in a superb lead performance. The producer of the Spanish-French film La Lapidation de Saint Etienne by director Pere Vilà i Barceló is Luis Miñarro, who also produced the recent Vary winner The Mosquito Net. Having entered the Forum of Independents competition in 2009, Canadian filmmaker Rafaël Ouellet will this year be competing in the main competition with his drama Camion (Camion), while the Norwegian The Almost Man will continue the stream of recent strong Scandinavian titles in the KVIFF Competition.

Films in Official Selection - Competition

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