Crystal Globe Competition Concludes Today with a Documentary from the Šumava Wilderness and an Afghan Mother’s Drama

The final candidates for the Crystal Globe will be presented today. Better Go Mad in the Wild, the second Czech entry, will be shown in the Grand Hall at 5 p.m., while the Afghan drama Cinema Jazireh will be screened at 7:30 p.m. Both films will be having their world premieres.

The documentary Better Go Mad in the Wild by Miro Remo is his fourth submission to the Crystal Globe Competition, following his previous film At Full Throttle, which was shown at KVIFF in 2021. The Slovak filmmaker is known for his interest in life on the margins. This time, he travelled to the depths of the Šumava forests, where he followed the lives of two brothers – identical twins Ondřej and František Klišík – as well as their animals.

Although the two quirky sixty-somethings are almost indistinguishable from each other in appearance, their personalities could not be more different. One is a poet and a dreamer, the other is firmly rooted in everyday reality. “From the beginning, they seemed to me like a filmmaker’s dream. Identical twins, brothers with a cabin fever hotter than the sun. Still, they were playful, and the scenery was beautiful. With their arrival, I’ve had my most intense artistic experience. I found myself in a perfect real-life studio with two perfect characters and a perfect conflict. So this is how our fairy-tale for adults began to emerge,” explained Remo. His visually captivating documentary took six years to create and combines an observational approach with stylised fairy-tale motifs.

Cinema Jazireh, the last film from this year’s Crystal Globe Competition, takes place in Afghanistan during the brutal rule of the Taliban. After her family is massacred, the protagonist Leila has only one goal: to find her son. To succeed in her mission, she radically changes her identity. “Leila is shaped by fear, but it also carries her forward. It becomes her companion, her compass and her mirror. Through Leila, I explore how fear exposes us and drives us to change. She isn’t without fear – she’s forged by fear.  There’s one thought that still haunts me: in extreme political regimes, nothing stays in place. The very fabric of reality changes and life suddenly becomes a land without coordinates. I try to confront this erosion of meaning, this existential drift, in my work. My cinematic language is based on emotional extremes, moral ambiguity, and the tension of human dualities. While Cinema Jazireh is set in a specific geographical location, at its core it speaks of something universal. We all wear changeable skin. “We are all moving through the rubble, looking for meaning,” said Turkish director Gözde Kural about her second film.