Published: June 22, 2015| 12:00 PM

The opening film of this year’s Karlovy Vary festival will be Time Out of Mind starring Richard Gere in the lead role. Gere himself will present the film, accompanied by the director Oren Moverman and actress Jena Malone.

We first encounter the melancholic protagonist of the third film by distinctive auteur filmmaker Oren Moverman just as he is thrown out of his ramshackle apartment and on to the street, with everything he owns in two plastic bags. This powerful story from the life of a homeless person in today’s New York offers a soulful character study of a man whose only hope in an otherwise desperate existence is to try to find reconciliation with his long estranged daughter.

Director, screenwriter, and erstwhile journalist Oren Moverman was born in Israel and settled in New York. He co-authored the screenplays to the films I´m not There (2007) by director Todd Haynes and Married Life (2007) by Ira Sachs. He wrote and directed the film The Messenger (2009), which was screened at the Sundance festival and won a Silver Bear for best screenplay at the Berlinale, followed by the film Rampart (2011), which was co-written with author James Ellroy, and Time Out of Mind (2014), which premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Jena Malone has been captivating audiences since she was a child, starring in Anjelica Huston’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1996), for which she earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for “Best Debut Performance”, Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (1997) and Chris Columbus’s Stepmom (1998). In 2001, she co-starred in Richard Kelly’s cult classic Donnie Darko. Today she continues to evolve with each new project, having worked with Anthony Minghella on Cold Mountain (2003), Joe Wright on Pride and Prejudice (2005), Sean Penn on Into the Wild (2007), and Paul Thomas Anderson on Inherent Vice (2014), which can be seen at this year’s KVIFF. Malone currently stars as Johanna Mason in the wildly popular The Hunger Games franchise.