- KVIFF 2026: The Guest, Dao, The Match (July 6, 2026)
The 60th Karlovy Vary International Film is still in its early stages, but it’s already showing a wealth of wonderful films. In this dispatch, you’ll find three films of differing origins. One is a world premiere in the festival’s main Crystal Globe competition, while the others previously debuted at the Berlinale and Cannes. They also, interestingly, concern memory and the heirlooms of the past we carry within ourselves.
One of the great early discoveries of this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is Mads Mengel’s deeply uncomfortable Nordic family drama “The Guest.” Playing in the Crystal Globe Competition, the film is set at a seaside resort where eager parents, Emilie (Mette Klakstein Wiberg) and Karl (Simon Bennebjerg), have invited family to christen their newborn baby Elliot. As mother and father settle in, the invitees: Emilie’s parents Frank (Peter Gantzler) and Kirsten (Petrine Agger), along with Karl’s sister Rikke (Josephine Park)—arrive. The resort they occupy is pristine and manicured with no unwanted detail left for the eye to capture. That is, until Karl’s estranged mother, Vibeke (Trine Dyrholm), arrives unannounced with a flurry of energy that seemingly causes the air to shift in direction.
It doesn’t take long before we learn why Karl didn’t invite his own mother to her grandson’s christening: Unsolved trauma and buried angst belonging to a difficult childhood helmed by a mentally ill mother soured Karl on Vibeke long ago. And despite many around him, including his own wife and sister, telling him to empathize with her plight, the bridge between mother and son might as well be on two different continents.
Consequently, “The Guest” takes a nuanced interest in forgiveness, understanding, and the kind of emotional and personal growth that tells one not to pass the scars of the past onto the people of the present. This taut, controlled, crucible of empathy, which relies on cutting cross zooms to up sadness of the situation, is supremely well acted: from a restrained Bennebjerg, who acutely counter-balances the frayed Park, to the charged Dyrholm, whose depiction of this bellicose yet vulnerable woman never crosses over into the overwrought. These feel like right people, delving into real pains, with a cautious openness that treats the difficult obstacles in their way with the complexity and respect they deserve.
Mengel’s feature directorial debut, therefore, is a stunner not solely because of the tough situation it presents, but primarily because it moves beyond being an engaging premise into a work whose well-drawn characters invite hard-earned poignancy without begging for easy forgiveness.
Arriving from the Berlinale into KVIFF, writer/director Alain Gomis’ soulful, three-hour epic family drama “Dao” moves with an immense awareness of time, culture, ancestry and kin. It begins, cheekily, yet sweetly, as a documentary: Gomis speaks with the actors during their auditions about what parts they’d like to play. As the film progresses, these documentary segments cue the film’s hefty topics (there’s an instance where each actor is asked about their relationship to their father).
From this form, Gomis often pivots in and out of something formless. In fact, it might be better to say that he slips into spaces, moments, and memories with the suddenness of a breeze that passes through two events. The first, set in France, concerns a wedding between Nour (D’Johé Kouadio) and James (Mike Etienne). The second follows Nour and her mother Gloria (Katy Correa), traveling to the latter’s Guinea-Bissau village for a ceremony commemorating the one-year passing of Béa’s father. It’s not initially obvious whether Gomis wants to contrast these ceremonies (one is clearly more Western infused, while the other is steeped in a different type of tradition) or parallel the way both inspire community.
Oftentimes the score’s plaintive jazz motif (the director’s previous film was the Thelonious Monk documentary “Rewind & Play”) signals an abrupt jump between spaces: the countryside cathedral that’s the site of Nour and James’ wedding and the colorful village that’s filled with indelible individual faces. Conversely, by the final third of the picture, the score binds these ceremonies together through the common occurrences that happen whenever varied friends and family mix past lives with booze.
Gomis, of course, dives into more than these characters’ interpersonal dynamics. There’s the imperativeness of oral storytelling, the specter of the slave trade (particularly as it relates to the diaspora), the multifacetedness of Blackness—which can traverse through bi-racial or bi-ethnic categories—caused by colonization, and the struggle of retaining traditions and finding success faced by those who decide to emigrate to the West.
With such sprawling interests, Gomis hasn’t rendered a plot-based film. Nor does he move with a conventional rhythm. Scenes digress, the camera imperfectly roves, and the pace speeds and slows without any concern for how these narrative or temporal choices might be perceived. Much like one of the film’s best scene, a near acapella wedding rendition of the Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” whose stirring immersion recalls Steve McQueen’s “Silly Games” scene in “Lover’s Rock,” the film translates the lived experience of Blackness into practice. What does that mean? “Dao” understands that Blackness is never standing still and rarely controlled; it’s unconventional only to outside eyes, but never lacks an interest in how the moment relates to one’s kin. “Dao,” therefore, is a beautiful communion with the cinematic and ancestral spirits.
In June 1986, an event that would have wide-ranging ramifications happened: Argentina faced England in the World Cup quarter final. The game would feature one of the most infamous goals in soccer history, “The Hand of God,” delivered by its brightest star: Diego Maradona. More than a sporting contest, the confrontation was the culmination of a fractious relationship between two countries and the leveling of a long-uneven geopolitical playing field. Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco’s entertaining documentary, “The Match,” which originally premiered at Cannes, recalls that game and the context surrounding it through the recollections of those who lived it.
English striker Gary Lineker and Argentine forward Jorge Valdano provide the accessible frame for this poppy blast from the past. They, along with their former teammates, watch the projected footage with nostalgia, admiration, and sometimes, pain. Lineker also narrates us into each sequence’s important bullet points, recalling the earlier 1966 meeting between England and Argentina, the 1982 eruption of the Falklands War, and the doom Thatcherism wracked on both countries. References to these historical components are often inspired by whatever is happening in the match, causing the film’s continuum, which operates similarly to “The Last Dance,” to shift back and forth between the past and the present subject.
Sometimes the heavy narration can make one feel like “The Match” doesn’t remotely trust its audience, dragging one from subject to subject with the subtlety of a ball to the head. But these overworked explanations do fold in neatly with the consciously overcooked use of music, which often matches soaring classical music to the game’s highlights—inciting a cheeky grandeur to take hold. Other highlights include the breakdown of the “Hand of God” evidence (did Maradona commit an illegal handball?) and some marveling by the subjects of what’s often considered the goal of the century. All of the former participants respect Maradona, even as some still hold a grudge against him for not personally admitting that he cheated (tellingly, John Barnes, the only person of color of the Englishmen, is the most forgiving).
At its worst, “The Match” is repetitive and circular in a way that doesn’t always serve the material. But when it’s humming, which it often is, Cabral and Franco’s ode to soccer glory is as earthshaking as its absorbing subject.
- You Have to Commit: Robert Richardson on “Robert Richardson: The White Devil” (July 6, 2026)
In Czech director Jana Hojdová’s raw, brazenly honest documentary, “Robert Richardson: The White Devil,” the legendary director of photography finds himself in a curious position. After decades capturing a plethora of towering films: “Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July,” “A Few Good Men,” “Casino,” “Kill Bill: Volume I & II,” “Shutter Island,” “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” and many more—the three-time Academy Award winner finds himself in front of the camera.
In “Robert Richard: The White Devil,” which, after six years of filming had its world premiere at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the cinematographer forms an unlikely friendship with Hojdová that began when the Czech filmmaker emailed him with a request to interview him for her Master’s thesis. What started out as a simple project soon evolved into a personal excavation of the filmmaker that involved searching through his personal archive of home movies, storyboards, scripts, and journals. The result, partly born from Hojdová and Richardson hunkering down during COVID, when a lockdown kept the filmmaker from returning to her country, is a truthful summation of an artist, a father, and spouse—one that features words from his long-time collaborators Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, to show the heavy toll achieving cinematic greatness can often exact.
Robert Richardson sat down with RogerEbert.com during KVIFF, where he was on hand to receive the festival’s Crystal Globe for outstanding artistic contributions to world cinema. He reflects on his archives, the weight of winning Oscars, and the cautionary tale he hopes this film provides.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In the film, you mention that when Jana [Hojdová] reached out to interview you for her Master’s thesis, you responded to her because the questions she sent were personal, not technical. Most creatives today would prefer to shy away from the personal. Why did that draw you in?
I found that’s true when I do most interviews. Even when I would do the ACR articles, American Cinematographer, they’re constantly searching for questions about the lighting, this, that, or what have you. I’d rather you interview the production designer, the editor, the director. You can talk to the gaffer.
I don’t want to just talk about what lenses I chose. I prefer you to talk about the things that inspired us to want to make this movie rather than how we shot it. So, when I got the first series of questions from Jana, I was all in.
How long did you correspond before you met her?
A couple of years. She told me she has 400 pages worth of our conversations.
She could make a docuseries!
She wants more. She has her thesis, and she wants to make it into a book.
This film began as her written thesis. How did it jump from that framework into a documentary?
Well, initially, we hadn’t met. She actually traveled across the States and ended up meeting me in New Zealand. I was finishing “Adrift” with Baltazar [Kormákur] and Shailene [Woodley] when she arrived. And while she was there, she asked more questions and did some shooting behind the scenes. I was like: Shooting behind the scenes? What are you doing? [he responds as Jana in a hesitating voice] Well, I’m, I’m, I’d like to, would you? I told her to get it out. What do you want to say?
She wanted to make a documentary. By that point, I’d already told her everything about my life, so I thought, let’s go for it. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But six years later….
Six years and COVID later! She arrived to interview you at your Cape Cod home for what she thought would be a week or two, but ended up having to stay with you for three months because of the lockdown in the Czech Republic. What was it like having the camera follow you around?
What was great about it was that I had a downstairs, which you see in that scene in the documentary when we’re walking down, and I had archives that included boxes that I hadn’t looked at in years. Suddenly, she was yanking out some of the films I’d been searching for that my grandfather had shot in 16mm. We had a boys camp and a girls camp on the water, and he had done a lot of work with the camera. So, I bought a projector and we put it up and started to look at that footage. She also found boxes and boxes of tapes, from Hi8 to cassette, to et cetera, et cetera. She’s watching all those and she’s making me even project them on the wall. And when she started, it never stopped. She just did not stop. She took all my books and pulled them out of all the boxes and put them up on shelves. So for me, it was like a plus because with her doing that, I didn’t have to do anything.
The scene that you’re talking about, when you enter into your basement, all the boxes are lined up in a row, and later we see you sitting in front of shelves, now filled with contents of the boxes, with you holding your journal.
Before she arrived there were only boxes and some empty space. The boxes also had DVDs, laser discs, and books. I bought shelves and then she put up four of these shelves and started to fill all the books in—they’re all film books.
The journal you’re holding is one of you personal diaries. Throughout the film, there’s also a lot of home movies shot by you of your wife at the time and your daughter. Were you conscious of keeping a personal archive?
I just never threw stuff away because a lot of them are family tapes. They just get stored because, at a certain point, you lose any way of actually moving them over. You’ve got a MiniDV, and then your sizes change, your Hi8, your this, your that. But I always carried a camera. I filmed everything all the time.
Oh we know! There’s so much home material shot by you.
And sometimes it’s too much! But a lot of those things allow you to witness how some things started. They are little films there that I made with cuts in the camera. I also had footage of my father; I had John Lennon’s voice.
You also have storyboards in your basement, like there’s a moment where you pull out the storyboard for “Platoon.” There’s also another moment when you talk about when you were hired on “Casino” and you sent a ten-page memo to Scorsese with suggestions.
Scorsese basically said he received my notes and he would never read them. Though, he did offer that when he finished the script, he would send me every shot. When I first got his phone call after the memo, in fact, I thought I was getting fired.
You thought you had crossed some creative boundary?
I don’t know. I had asked the AD, who he had worked with on many different films, and the producer, who is now his ex-wife, Barbara De Fina, and they told me to send it.
They laid a trap for you?
I don’t think he did. I think she might have. But I don’t know what happened.
You talked about always having a camera on you, and like I said, you have these diaries. It seems like every day of your life you’ve either manually journaled or digitally journaled. Where does that desire to keep a record of your life come from?
It stems from two different worlds. The camera is the way I want to see all the time. I just love having a camera and seeing through a camera. It’s often a way of protecting myself from the event. Keeping me back here. [puts his hand over his face like a lens] Not over there. The journals are always devoted to the film. So as you start, it’s like pre-prep and this and that. And then you do Polaroids. So back then, that’s how you calibrated your lighting, with the Polaroids through gray scale. I would take pictures of things and then make notes.
But then there would always be the thought of how the day went and what happened on that day or what was the attitude. Sometimes it would be a series of very personal things. Sometimes observations about people that were on the set. They just collided into each other and then they meshed. That’s just the process I went through. But it was not intentional, like I want to record my life—it was more like this is how I live. I shoot all the time. I’m either making a film and then making notes about the film, or I’m at home taking pictures and or on vacation or whatever. Now we do it with this [he picks up my phone]. You shoot all the time. I’m sure you do. It’s the same idea. Except if you have a video camera.
There’s a moment in the film where you talk about the stages of winning Oscars where the first one is for recognition and then the second one people are afraid of you. What did you mean by the “afraid of you” part?
The first nomination actually is the opening to people respecting you. I got a second one with “Born on the Fourth of July,” and then when the first came through with “JFK,” there was this: Ah, okay. Then you get called more and that’s when Marty began to consider me, along with other directors, like Rob Reiner. You’re moving up the ladder and getting acceptance from certain directors. I worked with John Sayles on two films and then suddenly I’m with a different director and a different sphere and with more money in budgets and this and that.
But when you win that second one, then only a certain tier of directors wants to make a call. People are more assured: He’s a two time Academy winner. Would I feel comfortable asking Meryl to do my movie? He must cost a fortune. We can’t call him. When it’s your third, you might as well just go hang yourself for a while until a topnotch [director] shows up, somebody who really is not afraid of anything.
That’s actually happened before. I did “A Private War” with Matthew Heineman, and it wasn’t even a vague question mark. Just come on, let’s make this low budget film. Even Baltazar doesn’t care. I mean, he’s a serious man. He just didn’t care what my accolades were. He just wanted to work with me. Those are the kind of people you need. Because it starts to take away the question marks people have about you: Can I handle this? Do I want to deal with this? What kind of person are you? Are you an asshole? People worry about what your attitudes are.
They’ll say: I hear he’s an asshole. He’s really hard on this crew. Thank you. My crew has been with me for 40 years. How hard could I be? Quentin [Tarantino] said that I’m really hard on my crew. Well, Quentin, those people have been with me for 20 years before they even got up to you. I might have been an asshole and I didn’t see it. It’s highly likely he’s correct.
In the film, Quentin mentions that you softened to your crew in between “Kill Bill” and “Inglorious Basterds.” Do you think you changed?
Here’s what happened on “Kill Bill.” We decided to shoot the film three perf. I didn’t know Quentin well enough at the time, and the producers didn’t help with this decision. We did three perf because you save almost one quarter of your budget because you’re three perfs versus four. But he likes to print everything and then project it. With three perf, that doesn’t work. You can project three perf, but it’s a much more complicated situation. So, I now take that upon myself as an issue. Because it’s great for going to the DI, but he’s a printer. You can print, but you have to go through a whole different process: three perf, then you make a dupe, and so forth. That whole process was different for him and he prints every take that he selects. So, that caused a friction between us that we got through, but it was not so cool.
I assume you’ve seen the film…
I haven’t! I’ve seen various parts of the film in different manifestations. I haven’t seen the final mix or formatting of the film.
Do you have a hope of what other people will think when they see the film?
I do. I want it to say that when you make a career choice and you do it with utter abandon, my life is what happens. Here are the consequences you’re going to run into. They’re not all positive. You’re damaging people along that route. Marty says it very beautifully at some point in the movie where he says: You’re going this direction and you hope the other person comes this direction with you. It doesn’t happen.
Quentin says something like: When you’re climbing Mount Everest, no one else is going with you on that trip. I think that’s the case. During that time the loss of my family was what was taking place. I lost all my family and relationships with my daughters that I’ve never retrieved. To this day, the two oldest daughters are still angry at me. I hope this makes others know that you can make choices. But if you do take them, you take them and you live with them. You commit to it.
- Fifty Years After the Bicentennial, A Declaration of Independence for American Filmmakers (July 3, 2026)
July 4th marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America. Speaking as someone old enough to have personally experienced the 200th anniversary way back in 1976—talking to my children about history, I used to add “When cave-kids rode dinosaurs to school”—I’m bummed out that it’s not a bigger deal.
But I understand. Whoo, boy, do I understand. The people are exhausted and bummed out when they aren’t seething with resentment at how far we’ve fallen in the world’s esteem and in our own estimation.
We’ve spent the past ten years having to look at and listen to one of the worst humans ever to occupy the Oval Office—a man who carried on like he was still president even when he was out of office, and who, in his second term (nonconsecutive, which somehow makes it worse) has seemed even more racist and sexist, more casually belligerent, and less interested in the details of governance than he did the first time around.
He seems to become genuinely engaged only when being flattered and bribed by American tech patrons or foreign nationals; pointing out the latest faux-gold ornamentation added to the White House; or presenting concept drawings for one of his numerous, self-aggrandizing architectural projects, such as the bunker-slash-ballroom he wants built for the low, low price of $600 million, or a triumphal arch that looked better in the original German.
No wonder his public approval ratings are lower than any president’s since public approval started being measured, and his “National State Fair” couldn’t even book has-beens to perform and draws fewer daily visitors than a child’s lemonade stand.
The thing is, we were in a similar place fifty years ago, though nowhere near as dire. The progressive utopia that seemed to be brewing in the 1960s was wiped away by the 1968 election of Republican president Richard Nixon, who promised to “restore law and order”—a dog-whistle euphemism for crushing dissent, especially by leftists and people of color—but who ended up resigning in disgrace six years later for ordering a politically motivated burglary and covering it up. The most notorious abuse of the Chief Executive’s pardoning power up until that point happened after his successor, former Vice President Gerald Ford, was sworn in and used his constitutional authority to inoculate Nixon against being prosecuted for any of his crimes. (Now I hear Homer Simpson telling Bart, as in “The Simpsons Movie,” “The most notorious abuse of the Chief Executive’s pardoning power so far.”)
Robert Altman’s “Nashville.”
The many great movies of that era were among the factors that kept Americans from feeling as if the country had completely given up on trying to live up to its professed ideals. In the run-up to the Bicentennial, there were numerous classics that analyzed America through history and metaphor: “Bound for Glory,” “Nashville,” “Taxi Driver,” “Killer of Sheep,” “Rocky,” “Chinatown,” two “Godfather” movies, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Cooley High,” “Car Wash,” “Shampoo,” “The French Connection,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” and too many others to list here.
What’s most striking about such films is that a lot of them were made outside the established channels. Some were made within the Hollywood system, which by the seventies had been in decline for three decades and was a shadow of its former self. An outsized portion came from one studio, Paramount, which was then run by Robert Evans, a former actor and sleazy hustler who nevertheless loved movies and respected film history; among other classics, he greenlit the “Godfather” movies and “Chinatown.”
But many more were developed and/or funded independently of the studios and then picked up for distribution. One independent company, BBS Productions, put out some of the sharpest, most uncompromising films of the late ’60s and early ’70s, including “Easy Rider,” “Harold and Maude,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Five Easy Pieces,” and “The King of Marvin Gardens.”
The great Robert Altman often developed his films in isolation and hoped they got picked up and distributed by a bigger fish: “Nashville,” arguably his masterpiece, was originally a United Artists movie, but when UA pulled out, Altman somehow cobbled together funding from Paramount and ABC. His 1970s comedy “Brewster McCloud” was originally financed by MGM, but Altman needed additional money to finish it and got it from one man, record producer Lou Adler. “Killer of Sheep” was a senior thesis film by Charles Burnett, made for spare change to fulfill a master’s degree requirement at UCLA Film School.
Charles Burnett’s ‘Killer of Sheep.”
The point is, the entertainment industry is arguably even more shallow, purely acquisitive, and disinterested in anything but profit now than it was back then, which is really saying something, but somehow, meaningful, relevant popular art still got made.
The same miracle is possible today.
Sure, it might be more difficult to get work that’s genuinely challenging or critical of the status quo through the mainstream production pipelines, thanks to the tremendous amount of media consolidation that’s happened in the past ten years (Disney buying 20th Century Fox, tech mogul Larry Ellison almost certainly ending up owning both Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount, and so on).
To be fair, something like the pre-Bicentennial cinema flowering only occurred because by the ’70s, the previously dominant system was in disarray, and studio bosses realized the old-style stuff wasn’t drawing young audiences or making older ones excited enough to leave their TV sets and buy a movie ticket.
But here, too, you can see parallels between then and now. Every few months since the economic devastation of 2020, a “Cinema, Dead or Alive?” type article has appeared in some major media outlet. But lately, to my relief, the pendulum has definitely swung towards “alive.”
According to recent news, this year North American box office receipts may finally match those from 2019, before the pandemic disrupted production of new movies and economically destroyed moviegoing, along with almost every other industry dependent on people leaving their homes and becoming part of a crowd. The most devoted theatrical moviegoing audience is Gen Z, and repertory and arthouse business is booming in some cities.
Both are unexpected developments that some observers have attributed to the growing popularity of Letterboxd, which “gamified” movie watching by making users feel as though they were competing in a global race to see as many films as possible. Related: the rise of so-called microcinemas—independently booked theaters with as few as twenty to fifty seats, where overhead is small enough that there’s freedom to book micro-budgeted, undistributed, and otherwise non-mainstream movies.
NEON’s “Obsession,” one recent (and potent) example of the YouTuber-to-filmmaker pipeline.
On top of all that, the most widely used platform for viewing new content, bigger than broadcast, cable and streaming audience numbers combined, is YouTube: every year, 2.8 billion people worldwide watch “content” on it, and while that might sound dispiriting at first, mainly because so many hugely successful videos are along the lines of “Watch This Jerk Get Owned in Waffle House Brawl,” it’s about twice the size of the entirety of global cinema put together.
And, as pretty much any modern filmmaker (who will likely hate being called a “content provider”) will tell you, the metric of success for non-mainstream, micro-budget or otherwise anti-commercial moviemaking is quite different from that of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm or DC. If a direct-to-YouTube (or Vimeo) movie gets more than 500,000 hits, it’s enough to make a well-off person who feels like putting a little bit of money into a movie take the filmmakers’ next project seriously.
It’s sort of a corollary of what happens in different areas of book publishing. If the new Stephen King novel sells only a million copies, it’s considered a disappointment. But if an independently published horror novel by a first-time author sells more than 50,000 copies, it’s considered enough of a success to be a viable candidate for film, TV, or streaming adaptation. (Many post-millennium hits, including “Fifty Shades of Grey,” “Beautiful Disaster,” “The Celestine Prophecy,” and “The Martian,” originated as self-published books.)
So yeah, things are tough out there, and the state of the world seems awfully bleak from certain angles. But just as there’s cause for cautious optimism ahead of the 2026 midterm elections and beyond, the future of cinema, whatever forms it ultimately takes, is the brightest it has been since the 1970s, when the old ways were falling apart and new ways were being born.
And so: independent filmmakers, if you’re reading this, go out and make your mark. It’s your time. As the THX Sound tagline used to put it, the audience is listening.
- 2026 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Preview: 10 Films We Can’t Wait to See (July 3, 2026)
It’s the 60th edition of Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, a cinematic event, running from July 3-11, that combines world premieres from across Eastern Europe, with festival highlights from Sundance, Berlinale, and Cannes, along with rare restorations and the major luminaries of cinema. This year promises to be an exceptional anniversary for one of the world’s oldest festivals, whose picturesque mountainous surroundings act as a visual cue for the steadiness of this institution.
This year, I will cover the festival once more (Thanks to Isaac Feldberg for covering for me last year), and I can’t wait to dive into all that KVIFF has to offer. Come back starting Monday morning, July 6, for my coverage, which will include many of the 10 films below.
“Dao”
One of the major films from Berlinale 2026, Senegalese director Alain Gomis’ “Dao” takes its latest bow at KVIFF. The three-hour family epic oscillates between ceremonial family gatherings happening in France and Guinea-Bissau to two women in two different variations of the same culture. Gomis’ intermingling of European and African values leaps over into his kinetic filmmaking sensibilities, wherein “Dao” mixes narrative film elements with documentary aesthetics for a picture that takes pleasure in exploring the destabilization of tradition and identity.
“Black Money for White Nights”
Following “Triumph,” which starred Maria Bakalova as a psychic used by the Bulgarian army to search for an alien artifact, the directing duo Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov are back. Their latest is an equally bleak tragicomedy about an elderly couple whose hopes of visiting Russia to experience the White Nights, a moment of perpetual twilight, are dashed when the country invades Ukraine—rendering their trip null and void. The harsh turn of events, allow for harsher secrets to be revealed, upending what appeared to be a happy, stable marriage via two frank lead performances.
“Hijamat”
Nader Saeivar, a longtime creative collaborator of Jafar Panahi—the pair co-wrote “It Was Just an Accident” and “3 Faces”—arrives in the Crystal Globe competition with his fourth directorial work: “Hijamat.” Edited by Panahi, the film, seen through the eyes of its conflicted protagonist Murat (Kida Khodr Ramadan), considers the limits of queerness within a traditionalist Islamic culture. A ruminative work filled with silences that are both revealing and looming and built on the measured expressions of its lead actor, Ramadan, the film positions itself as a cinematic fight for internal peace.
“The Match”
With the World Cup ongoing, Karlovy Vary is remaining on brand by screening Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco’s “The Match” as their opening night film. Cabral and Franco’s direct documentary employs the 1986 edition to the sporting event—when Maradona had his legendary ‘Hand of God’ goal—to dive into the impact the Falklands War had on Argentina. The sport, therefore, becomes a battleground where old geopolitical wounds can be healed and an unleveled playing field is rebalanced to heart pounding results.
“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York”
Some premises immediately catch your eye: In Noah Segan’s “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York,” John Turturro stars as a thief incarcerated since the 1980s, who upon release into a modern world, discovers his livelihood wholly altered. Re-teaming Turturro with past collaborators, like Steve Buscemi and Giancarlo Esposito, the reflective picture is a minor key interrogation of the passage of time.
“There’s a certain bleak finality to [the film] that serves Turturro’s acting style well. He… almost seems to relish being opposite former acting partners like Buscemi and Esposito, with whom he starred in one of the most essential New York films of all time: ‘Do the Right Thing.’ Looking at them again, almost four decades later, feels like a vision of a changing city, adding another grace note to a film that’s full of them,” wrote Brian Tallerico out of the film’s Sundance premiere. It’s KVIFF’s closing night film.
“Paris Paris”
Premiering in the Proxima competition, Isabelle Tollenaere’s allegorical immigrant drama follows three men: Yi-En from China, Junior from Congo, and Hamzah from Palestine—as they traverse the cultural, economic, and language barriers they encounter in Paris. Consequently, the trio share a dilapidated apartment in a building set to be demolished, a metaphor of displacement that mirrors their journeys into a new country. Tollenaere’s ruminative conception of these characters and her dashes of magical realism further open a narrative that deeply considers the impermanence of creating a home when the one you’ve been forced from looms large in your psyche and in your heart.
“Robert Richardson: The White Devil”
One of cinema’s great cinematographers has the camera turned on him. It all began when Jana Hojdova, a graduate of FAMU, reached out to Robert Richardson—the three-time Academy Award winner known for lensing “Platoon,” “JFK,” “The Aviator,” and more—to interview him for her master’s graduate project. To her surprise, he agreed. To her even greater shock, her interview request turned into an entire film. Hojdova diligently captures Richardson as he goes through his priceless archives of photos and storyboards and reveals parts of his life that had previously been unknown.
“Rose”
It feels like no one is riding a higher high than Sandra Hüller. While the German actress has always been well respected, garnering praise for “Toni Erdmann,” the double-hit of “The Zone of Interest” and her Oscar-nominated turn in “Anatomy of a Fall,” sent her into the stratosphere. In this year alone, she has starred in the box office smash “Project Hail Mary” and premiered Paweł Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland” at Cannes, and has Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger” still waiting in the wings. “Rose,” which premiered at Berlinale 2026, netting her the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance, is a 17th-century set period piece that sees Hüller disguising herself as a male soldier and heir to an estate. It’s a shapeshifting role for an actress who appears capable of playing anybody.
“The Story of Documentary Film – 1980s”
Northern Irish documentary filmmaker Mark Cousins is one of those hyper-active creators whose persistently evolving filmography causes you to wonder if they sleep. A couple of years ago his ode to British artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things,” took home the festival’s top Crystal Globe prize. This year, he’s back with a segment from his survey of the history of documentary film. While a previous part covering the 1970s premiered at Cannes 2026, KVIFF will host the section recalling the 1980s. His latest filmic essay figures to feature the hallmarks of his expressive style—from his poetic prose narration to his keen curiosity—and a wealth of new insights.
“Tainted Horseplay”
One of Věra Chytilová’s lesser-seen films, “Tainted Horseplay” (“A Hoof Here, A Hoof There”), is an oddball tragicomedy set in Karlovy Vary. It follows three friends who balance their lives by trading off mundane days for exciting sexually liberated nights. Their explicit fun is interrupted with the advent of AIDs. The touchy subject doesn’t deter Chytilová’s sense of frivolity and her love of poking at the male ego. Nor did it stop the Czech Republic (at the time Czechoslovakia) from submitting it for the 62nd Academy Awards. A digital restored version of the film is set to screen at KVIFF.
- 10 of Roger Ebert’s Favorite Movies About America (July 3, 2026)
Roger Ebert loved movies for the stories they tell about people and also for the world they reflect and sometimes shape. In his later years, he wrote the Great Movies books to inspire audiences to look beyond current releases to better understand what led us to where we are in the world of movies and in our culture, politics, and history. And then, in his last years, his column “Roger Ebert’s Journal” included his views on politics and the essential American values, along with very personal stories.
The movies that mattered most to Roger showed us the lives of people outside our experience and illuminated a new perspective on our own. Movies love stories about outsiders, underdogs, and rebels, all central to the American character. In honor of the 250th anniversary of the document that led to the founding of the United States of America with a new, if flawed declaration of the inalienable rights of all individuals, here are some of the movies he loved most for what they showed us about our country, the best and worst, the failures and the resilience, and beauty of our aspirations and the mistakes we make in trying to achieve them.
“Citizen Kane“
Roger’s audio commentary on what many consider the greatest American film of all time is one of the most erudite, fascinating discussions of filmmaking ever recorded. Kane is a boy taken from his family to be given all the advantages of wealth, who becomes a man, careless yet optimistic and public-spirited, but then bitter and selfish. And it is a masterpiece of cinematic storytelling, visual, dramatic narrative, acting, cinematography, and performance, with its 25-year-old writer-director in the title role.
In his “Great Movies” essay about “Citizen Kane,” Roger wrote about the “bravura visual moments,” the insightful depiction of history and progress, the circular storytelling that adds more context and nuance with every return to an incident, the impulse to try to understand, and the ultimate unsolvable mystery of any human being.
“The Best Years of Our Lives“
Roger praised this film about the difficulties faced by ordinary American men in returning home after WWII for not trying to paint them as extraordinary. They are good, decent men, but they are not especially heroic, and their struggles to adjust to “normal” life and to process how their experiences have changed them remain relatable even eight decades later.
Twenty years ago, Roger wrote: “Seen more than six decades later, it feels surprisingly modern: lean, direct, honest about issues that Hollywood then studiously avoided. After the war years of patriotism and heroism in the movies, this was a sobering look at the problems veterans faced when they returned home.”
“The Godfather“
Roger noticed something unusual about this Best Picture Oscar winner that explains our fascination with, and even sympathy for, its characters. We may see a lot of brutal, graphic violence, but all of it takes place within the limited world of the crime syndicates. He called it “a brilliant conjuring act, inviting us to consider the Mafia entirely on its own terms.” The audience hears about threats outside of that world, notably a story about a gun held to a man’s brow, and we see the severed head of a man’s beloved horse. But we do not see any violence against people who are not part of the syndicate.
Roger said that, within his own world, Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone has a sense of morality in how he grants favors and insists on staying out of the drug business. And yet, the story is about the corruption of his son, Michael, who at first insists he is not part of the criminal world but, in this movie and its sequel, becomes increasingly ruthless.
“Nashville“
Roger called Robert Altman’s film about country music performers a musical that is also a political parable and “a tender poem to the wounded and the sad.” He wrote: “The buried message may be that life doesn’t proceed in a linear fashion to the neat ending of a story. It’s messy and we bump up against others, and we’re all in this together. That’s the message I get at the end of “Nashville,” and it has never failed to move me.”
“All the President’s Men“
The “third-rate burglary” break-in to the Democratic office at the Watergate building turned out to be the thread that unraveled crimes at the highest levels of the United States government. The people who pulled on that thread were two young reporters at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Roger, a journalist himself who loved his profession and adhered to its highest principles of integrity, appreciated the authenticity in this depiction of reporters who challenged the most powerful people in the country. “Who’d have thought you could build tension with scenes where Bernstein walks over to Woodward’s desk and listens in on the extension phone? But you can. And the movie’s so well paced, acted, and edited that it develops the illusion of momentum even in the scenes where Woodward and Bernstein are getting doors slammed in their faces.”
“Killer of Sheep“
I deeply appreciate how Roger was always willing to reconsider a film’s value. When this movie was first released, Roger wrote, “Instead of making a larger statement about his characters, [director Charles Burnett] chooses to show them engaged in a series of daily routines, in the striving and succeeding and failing that make up a life in which, because of poverty, there is little freedom of choice.”
Thirty years later, Roger admitted he had made a mistake in his view of the story about a Black man who works in a slaughterhouse and his family. The daily routines and the absence of freedom are the larger statement. “In this poetic film about a family in Watts, [Burnett] observes the quiet nobility of lives lived with values but without opportunities. The lives go nowhere, the movie goes nowhere, and in staying where they are, they evoke a sense of sadness and loss.”
“The Right Stuff“
Philip Kaufman’s film is based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the US space program, from the breaking of the sound barrier to the selection of the Mercury 7 astronauts.
Writing about it in 2002, Roger wrote that its lukewarm reception at the box office was because “audiences were not ready for a movie that approached the program with skepticism, comedy and irony.“ The larger story of the film goes beyond the achievements and colorful characters of the space program to a meditation on a classic American story, the uneasy transition from the character and skills of the lone cowboy to the more “civilized” established community, as we also see in “My Darling Clementine,” “Lonely Are the Brave,” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
“Hoop Dreams“
There’s no better example of Roger’s perspective—and his influence—than his four-star review of this documentary about two Black boys from poor families who are given basketball scholarships to an expensive private school. “A film like “Hoop Dreams” is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and make us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself … [It is] poetry and prose, muckraking and expose, journalism and polemic. It is one of the great moviegoing experiences of my lifetime.”
“Do the Right Thing“
Roger said his first viewing of Spike Lee’s searing story of hot weather and hot tempers in Brooklyn penetrated his soul. It exemplifies Roger’s view that movies are “an empathy machine.” He wrote: Spike Lee “made a movie about race in America that empathized with all the participants. He didn’t draw lines or take sides but simply looked with sadness at one racial flashpoint that stood for many others.”
He noted with appreciation the extraordinary stylistic achievement of the then-32-year-old writer/director and marveled at his empathy for all of the characters. “If you can’t try to understand how the other person feels, you’re a captive inside the box of yourself.”
“Chop Shop“
The immigrant experience is an essential part of the American Story. Roger loved this film from writer/director Ramin Bahrani, the American-born son of Iranian immigrants. The adult performers in the film work in the Iron Triangle area where the film was shot. They often used their own words and were often unaware that the camera was rolling.
Roger said, “What is remarkable is the way, after careful preparation and multiple takes, Bahrani finds performances in them that are so natural and convincing, they put professional actors to shame.” The story is about Ale, a 12-year-old orphan trying to care for himself and his sister by working several jobs, including getting $5 for each car he flags down for an auto repair shop. Roger said, “Ale is in the tradition of American symbols of upward striving.”
