This year’s Proxima section for progressive works of cinema includes two Slovak debuts. With Lover Not a Fighter – a stylistically and narratively inventive film full of humor – you can enjoy summer like when you were a teenager. 33 Steps, meanwhile, follows a man who suffered serious injuries in a racially motivated attack and whose assailant is about to be released after thirteen years in prison.
The section’s other films take us far beyond our borders. Truck Drivers paints a collective portrait of Argentinian drivers, while Homo sive natura takes us into the remote forests of eastern Cambodia and a group of the region’s original inhabitants. In A Whole Person Almost, two people on a Greek island find unexpected understanding; The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb, a romance with a touch of magical realism, takes us all the way to India; and Against Nature, an evocatively told story of a silent man, brings Mexico to Karlovy Vary.
Austrian entry My Friend the Porn Star takes a playful look at adult films, while Belgium’s Paris Paris is an allegory of searching, loss, displacement, and discovery. Incinerator is a screen adaptation of a story by Japanese author Kaori Ekuni, nicknamed the “female Murakami,” and the Croatian debut Petty Thieves explores the sense of mutual belonging felt by people who dream of a better future in the face of a tourist industry that pushes them to the margins. Also living on the margins, though in London, is the photographer in Rain Catcher, whose voyeuristic tendencies bring him fame on social networks. Find out about all the unusual protagonists of these unusual films!
More information about the films in the Proxima Competition is available here.
