The Karlovy Vary IFF welcomes director Steven Soderbergh

This year’s 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will play host to Oscar-winning director and producer Steven Soderbergh. The internationally respected filmmaker will be in town to present two of his films, Kafka and Mr. Kneff, which are being shown as part of the festival’s Kafka retrospective, The Wish to Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinema.

Festival audiences will have the unique chance to see both films presented in person by their creator, who is known to only rarely accept invitations to such events.

The mysterious drama Kafka (1991), which Steven Soderbergh shot in Prague with Jeremy Irons in the title role, is a sophisticated blending of Kafka’s real life with fiction, although viewers have absolutely no way of knowing whether the events in the film are real or the fruits of the author’s imagination. 

Thirty years later, Soderbergh decided to re-edit Kafka to create an entirely new film. Set in Prague in 1919, Mr. Kneff is the story of a writer who uses his dead-end job as inspiration for his writing. The new version is twenty minutes shorter, with a rearranged narrative structure. In addition, Soderbergh colorized some of the scenes to more clearly differentiate between reality and the main protagonist’s imagination. The film also has a different soundtrack, which among other things includes an instrumental version of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” Mr. Kneff, which can be described as a film about Kafka without Kafka, is characterized by a noticeably greater dose of surrealism and sense of alienation than the original film. 

Steven Soderbergh burst onto the scene with his directorial debut Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), which won a Palme d´Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The film subsequently earned him nominations for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay. Soderbergh’s subsequent filmography is a distinctive mix of titles, ranging from audience-friendly films to extraordinary artistic experiments. In many cases, he not only wrote and directed the film but also took on the role of cinematographer or editor.

After making the romantic comedy Out of Sight (1998) starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, Soderbergh shot the distinctive and formally unconventional thriller The Limey (1999). This was followed by the successful Erin Brockovich (2000) with Oscar-winning Julia Roberts in the title role. The film earned Soderbergh an Oscar nomination for Best Director. He soon took home an Academy Award for the crime drama Traffic (2001). His next film was the crime comedy Ocean’s Eleven (2001 Eleven), which featured a remarkable ensemble cast of Hollywood stars, including George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, and numerous others. The film’s success spawned two sequels – Ocean’s Twelve (2004) and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007).

Soderbergh’s complexity is reflected in his choice of themes and genres, as demonstrated by such films as his remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s famous sci-fi Solaris (2002), the two-part biopic of the revolutionary Che Guevara (Che, 2008), the psychological crime thriller Side Effects (2013), the comedy Magic Mike (2012), the biographical drama Behind the Candelabra (2012), and the crime comedy Logan Lucky (2017). Soderbergh set the thriller Kimi (2022) during the COVID-19 pandemic, revisited the protagonists of Magic Mike in Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023), and premiered the psychological thriller Presence (2024) at this year’s Sundance festival.

He has also successfully ventured into television production, among other things with the series The Knick (2014–2015), which was nominated for several Emmy Awards.