kviff.com
News
Festival Guide
  • Tickets and Festival Pass
  • Accommodations
  • Transportation
  • Festival cinemas
  • No Barriers project
  • Kids at the festival
  • Festival Shop
Program
  • Catalogue of films
  • Accompanying programme
  • Archive of films
  • Audience award
  • KVIFF Talks
  • Film Entry
Film Industry
  • Industry accreditation
  • Film Industry at KVIFF
  • Industry Days Programme
  • KVIFF Eastern Promises
  • KVIFF Talents
Press
  • Press accreditation
  • Press Service
  • For download
  • Press releases
  • Photogallery
  • Videogallery
About the festival
  • Festival description
  • Programme sections
  • Awards
  • History
  • We support non-profits
  • Photogallery
  • Partners
  • Why We Support the Festival
  • Contacts
CZ
Sign in
Film Archive

Café Society

Special Events 2016 / Café Society / USA 2016

Bobby is a timorous young man who’s headed out to Hollywood to get to know the world. After graduating from the school of hard knocks, he returns to New York and becomes a convivial man about town as the manager of a notorious establishment. Allen’s traditionally refined retro excursion to the dazzle and depravity of the 1930s.

Café Society Café Society

Synopsis

Bobby leaves his ever-belligerent Jewish family and heads to Hollywood to learn about the world. Mesmerized by the dazzling glamour of movie stars and, above all, by secretary Vonnie’s considerable charms, he experiences moments of both giddy happiness and bitter disappointment. He returns to his native New York with a broken heart – and newly-acquired savviness – to run an establishment renowned for its sinful chic. But then, when it finally seems that things are going his way, fate reshuffles the deck… Renowned DOP Vittorio Storaro’s rich lensing brings heft to the golden era of Hollywood and the heyday of the New York Mob in an intricate labyrinth of luxury apartment suites and menacingly-darkened hideaways. Jesse Eisenberg’s transformation from a neurotic underling into a convivial man about town enables Allen to present an affectionately nostalgic story of thwarted love with all his trademarks: wonderful music, polished one-liners, and debacles from which there is no escape – all set against the romantic machinations of muddled protagonists forced to pay for destiny’s malicious tricks.

Kamila Dolotina

About the film

96 min / Color, DCP

Director Woody Allen / Screenplay Woody Allen / Dir. of Photography Vittorio Storaro / Editor Alisa Lepselter / Art Director Santo Loquasto / Producer Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum, Edward Walson / Production Gravier Productions, Perdido Productions / Cast Jeannie Berlin, Steve Carell, Jesse Eisenberg, Blake Lively, Parker Posey, Kristen Stewart / Sales FilmNation Entertainment / Distributor AQS a.s.

About the director

Woody Allen

Woody Allen (b. 1935, New York City), director, screenwriter, actor, composer, and writer. His dogged consistency has led to a filmography of almost 50 features in as many years, all without sacrificing his unmistakable style, a feat demanding due admiration. The leitmotiv of love polygons that set the vortex of marital and personal crises spinning is the thread connecting his pictures Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989); then we have ingenious allusions to Russian literary classics in the titles Love and Death (1975) and Match Point (2005). After a trilogy set in European capitals that began with Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), this year Allen pays a visit to 1930s Hollywood and New York, which he presents in all their intrinsic beauty and baseness.

Contacts

AQS a.s.
Na Klikovce 7/367, 140 00, Praha 4
Czech Republic
Phone: +420 221 436 100
E-mail: [email protected]

FilmNation Entertainment
150 W. 22nd Str., 9th Floor, NY 10011, New York
United States of America
Phone: +1 917 484 8900
E-mail: [email protected]

Guests

Andrea Metcalfe
Distributor

Other partners
Newsletter

First-hand brews throughout the year.
Be among the first to learn about upcoming events and other news. We only send the newsletter when we have something to say.

Follow us on the web:

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
is part of the KVIFF Group family, which covers other projects as well:

© 2025 KVIFF GROUP

Rules for Visitors / Website visitors privacy policy / GTC / Personal Data Protection / Rules for Claim / Rules and Regulations / Contacts