Published: June 17, 2015| 10:00 AM

The celebrations around the 50th Karlovy Vary IFF will include an opportunity for festival audiences to encounter a special section entitled Six Close Encounters. For the programme, six international directors who share a history with the Karlovy Vary IFF present one of their favourite films.

“It is extremely important to us that we maintain long-term relationships with filmmakers whose work we follow continuously, often from the beginning of their careers, which in many cases were launched at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival,” says KVIFF artistic director Karel Och.

With this in mind, the Karlovy Vary IFF asked six prominent directors and friends to select and personally present a favourite film that played a fundamental role in defining their own styles on filmmaking.

The following six directors contributed to the Six Close Encounters showcase:

Mark Cousins is a Northern Irish filmmaker, writer, curator and traveller, who presented his 15-hour documentary project The Story of Film: An Odyssey or his poetic reflection What is This Film Called Love? at KVIFF. For the new section, he chose the Iranian-French film A Moment of Innocence (Nun va Goldoon, 1996) by one of the leading directors of the Iranian new wave, Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

Kim Ki-duk, the talented and versatile Korean director of The Coast Guard or Time attended the festival also for the very first retrospective devoted to his work in 2002. He will present the film Poetry (Shi), directed by his colleague and countryman Lee Chang-dong in 2010.

Sergei Loznitsa, a Belorussian director based in Germany, first took part in the Karlovy Vary IFF with his documentary films, his feature-films My Joy and In the Fog were selected for the competition in Cannes. He will show director Kira Muratova’s magnum opus, The Asthenic Syndrome (Astenicheskiy sindrom, 1989). This raw epic about the state of Soviet society during the spread of perestroika won the Special Jury Prize at the 1990 Berlinale.

Luis Miñarro is one of the most highly-regarded European producers of independent cinema. In 2010 he was awarded the Crystal Globe for Best Film in Karlovy Vary for The Mosquito Net. For his contribution to the section Miñarro chose the Orson Welles’ legendary 1958 film noir Touch of Evil. 

Michaël R. Roskam was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for his feature-length debut, Bullhead. This year’s programme includes his latest work, The Drop which was shot in the US. The Belgian director, too, reached for a title from the film noir shelf, selecting the film adaptation of Auguste Le Breton’s Rififi (Du rififi chez les hommes, 1955) by director Jules Dassin.

Sion Sono has progressively earned his reputation as one of the most nonconformist contemporary filmmakers from Japan, thanks to his films Noriko's Dinner Table or Love Exposure. He will be showing Karlovy Vary audiences his favourite film, Babe (1995), Chris Noonan’s family comedy which was nominated for seven Oscars and received the award for Best Special Effects.