Halfway through the 9 day fest now, and it's been pretty good times. This is a laid-back, casual film fest, with a lot of good films to offer. Its relaxed nature doesn't mean, however, that you don't need to fight a bit to get into your first choices of films. Practically every sceening is packed solid; if the tickets didn't sell out beforehand, it quickly fills up with ticketless but pass-holding fans who are let in 5 minutes before each showing.
It works like this: each morning the box office opens at 8, when you can buy tickets for that day and the next. A festival pass entitles you to three free screenings a day. You can buy more tickets, if you like, or you can show up and hope there's still room. But personally, after overdoing it at some previous film festivals (a binge of something like 50 films in 12 days at the Vancouver film fest a decade ago comes to mind), i find that 3 a day is my limit anyway.
The first bus of the day from the stadium where i'm camped to the Thermal Hotel, where the box offices are located, is at 8am. So every morning - almost - i'm up in time to catch this bus, after usually staying up past midnight to catch some interesting late night film screening, to buy my tickets as early as possible. Even arriving at the box office that early, though, I'm still at the tail end of the morning rush. But, especially since the crowds diminished slightly after the weekend, I usually don't run into too many sold out shows. And there's so many films I'm interested in seeing, I've always got backup choices if my first ones aren't available.
So my days start early and end late - and my sleep is never great in a campground with hundreds of others, not all of whom are there to sleep - but my days leave plenty of time for eating, writing, cappaccino sipping, and people watching.
The eating is not great. By this time I'm sick (literally) of Czech food: greasy, meaty, bready. But there aren't a lot of other options. There's so-so pizza and pasta. There's questionable Chinese. There's expensive sandwiches. Last night I ate at a Lebonese place called Ali Baby's. In Canada, Lebonese food is synonymous with cheap fast food, so i was surprised by the prices (though it was fast). I paid twice what i'd normally pay for a meal, though it was twice as good, my first truly good restaurant meal in ages. And vegetarian! Despite the price, I think I'll have to go back.
The normally sleepy and geriatric town of Karlovy Vary is transformed this week into a youthful party town. Students from around the county who would never have anything to do with such a relaxing, boring place, descend on it for this one week a year. While the packed theatres and crowds of youth fighting - though ever so good-naturedly - for a free seat attest to the passion they have for the films, they are here equally for the partying. Czechs - in particular the youth - seem to have an almost insatiable appetite for partying. Beer is for sale, and consumed, everywhere. I read one British critic's comments, saying this was his favourite festival to come to, because of the enthusiasm of the crowds, the lack of pretentiousness - and i can say that's true from what i've seen. There's a bit of the high-class, ritzy thing going on - black audis chauffering people from the fancy hotels to the shiny clubs; security guards in black suits trying to look essential; crowds gathered around red carpets (only, they're green), waiting for a limo to disgorge some director they've never heard of - but for the most part this is a down-to-earth affair.
This fest has shown me a new side of the Czech people. Maybe spending so much time in the countryside, I saw mostly older people. Here, I'm seeing the younger generation, and I'm impressed. They seem of a different breed than their parents - understandably so, given the changes that have occurred here in the past 20 years. The older generation is great in its own way, but more impenitrable than the youth, at least for me (and not just because of the language barrier). I find the youth to be open, hopeful, happy, and fun-loving. A good balance between free-spirited and thoughtful. Always traveling in groups of college buddies. I don't want to overstate it, but you could say it's the first generation to grow up here in quite awhile free and prosperous, in an independent state. It shows. Much of the great atmosphere at the film fest owes itself to the youth who flock here once a year. I can say that this is best best film festival, on the whole, that i've been to.
Today I saw a film called "Rok 68", a poetic documentary about the time around the Prague Spring. I knew little of this history. The Czechs tried to take socialism in a different direction from the Warsaw Pact countries - put a "human face" on it, open it up to real democracy - and their "brother" states sent in the tanks. The Czechs have always lived on the edges of other great powers. As i know from permaculture, "edge" is where the action is. They receive multiple influences. They straddle the ethnic and cultural divide between eastern and western Europe. They've tried repeatedly to chart their own course, only to be thwarted, betrayed, time and again by the great powers in whose shadow they are forced to live. I see their position in the middle of Europe as the reason behind why they seem to have a particular talent for balance. During the Cold War, they were communist, but not part of the Warsaw Pact. They were inbetween. And they love peace. Maybe it was just that they saw that fighting was hopeless, when they were ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, invaded by the Nazis, occupied by the Soviets and their allies, but I think they also genuinely hate violence. Many small nations, after all, have fought invaders to the last man - but the Czechs have taken a different course. It's not that they lack bravery: civilians risked their lives and died in the streets offering symbolic protest against the Soviet tanks; students immolated themselves in an effort to awaken their people to revolution. But they seem to have reached a common calculus that the costs of violent resistence were greater than a temporary aquiescence to the will of the powerful - even if that temporary retreat meant sacrificing another generation to the stagnacy of ideology. I respect this approach. I think that, in the end, it has paid off for the Czech people. They now have a culture that has passed through the worst horrors of the 20th century with its optimism, culture, and heritage intact.
But back to the film fest. A series of shorts are screened before each film. Each one depicts a past winner of the Crystal Globe, the KVIFF's award for contribution to world cinema - Milos Forman, Danny De Vito, Harvey Keitel - and what they're using their little statuette holding a crystal ball aloft for. Harvey Keitel, for instance, tells a bartender in a Brooklyn dive about how "some asshole" dropped the award on his foot, thus accounting for its bandaged condition; Milos Forman uses his to crush his pills; a slumbering De Vito to knock over a ringing bedside phone he doesn't want to answer. They're very well done. But they also show how this festival doesn't take itself too seriously. And the fans clearly support this sentiment, because they always appaud these shorts, even though they must have seen them many times by now.
A few years ago Prague tried to start up its own film festival, and essentially replace KV as the premiere award giving festival in the Czech Republic. But KV's fans rallied behind the older film fest (this is its 43rd year) and turned out in large numbers to show their preference for it. After a few years, the Prague fest folded.
I must have been here for awhile now, because I'm starting to run into people I've met on a regular basis. It began with small incidents back in Cheb, like seeing that same thick-eyeglassed fisherman who was fishing beside our campsite one morning, then fishing in the river in the middle of town the next. Or exchanging a few words with some German tourists sitting across from me in the internet cafe, then seeing them the next day biking on a path along the river, as I paddled downstream. Here in Karlovy Vary, i ran into a couple of girlfriends of Lucie's who I'd met when i was here before. Then a few minutes later, i bumped into a woman i'd last seen in Cheb, and hoped to never see again. With a sinking heart, she told me that she lived in KV. She comes off as a little insane. My first tip-off was when, after she'd struck up a conversation with Viktoria, Sergio and I, she didn't let me get off the bus at our stop with the others, because she was writing her address on a piece of paper on my lap. I told her this was my stop, that i had to get off, that my friends were getting off as i speak, but she just said, "you can get off at the next one," and i watched helplessly as the doors closed between my travel buddies and I, and the bus pulled away. They caught up with me at the next stop, me still in the clutches of this woman. She seemed very keen on speaking Spanish with us, and getting us to stay at her parents' pension. All the while her face was flushed with a gaping smile and wide eyes. When we finally escaped i said to Viktoria, "Now i know what's it's like to be a celebrity stalked by fans." That is what it had felt like.
On this second encounter, she dragged me downstairs to meet her friends. But they had already gone into the movie theatre, and I didn't have a ticket. Then she made a brief but unsuccessful attempt to persuade the usher to let me in anyway. Then she bent over and started rifling through her bag, looking for her ticket, and blocking the flow of incoming movie-watchers. The usher had to ask her to move aside. Then one of her friends did arrive, and looked at her like she was crazy for trying to arrange some sort of meeting with me minutes before they were supposed to go into the theatre. I finally escaped when she went into the theatre, me saying i'd call her tomorrow. i don't know which I'm more afraid of: calling her and getting together, or not calling her and running into her and facing - what reaction? Her smile is the sort that i worry can turn to rage on a dime. I haven't called her yet, nor run into her again. But chances are high I will run into her, KV being as intimate as it is.
A more welcome encounter was with Eva and several of her friends. As I mentioned, she's a couchsurfer from KV (though, like almost all young people, she goes to school somewhere else, and is moving soon to Prague). She's a language student (Spanish) and many of her friends are language teachers. So i got another opportunity to speak Spanish, while we ate some pretty good Mexican food. After lunch, we spent the rest of the afternoon on the patio of the Thermal Hotel, drinking beer and talking, while more of her friends (who were all crashing at her parents' house in the suburbs - there were about 6 of them there i think) dropped in. The fact that everyone has a cellphone - or "mobile", as they call them here - greatly facilitates the kind of spontaneous meeting up for drinks that is a staple of social life for young people here. Every time I've called someone here, they always say, "I'm at such-and-such a bar, with some friends, come join us," or "i'm at such-and-such place, waiting for some friends to meet me here, then we're going to the bar. come meet me." this goes on all day, it seems.
Eva had a really smart, interesting, funny group of friends - which didn't surprise me considering the high quality of people I've met so far through couchsurfing - and I enjoyed hanging out with them for an afternoon. I can get quite talkative when I've been deprived of conversation for awhile. I had to hold myself back so i didn't monopolize things, especially in a foreign language (though they all spoke English well). Later that night, I met up with several of them again at a screening of Nicholas Roeg's (for whom there is a retrospective here) "Two Deaths" (which, despite its dark theme of the triumph of sexual obsession over morality, set during the Romanian revolution of 1989, I greatly enjoyed), and could have gone out to a club after that, but choose sleep instead. (Which i didn't get much of, since at 5am a group of people right next to me seemed to be either taking down or setting up a tent, talking and laughing loudly all the while. "I hate people," I grumbled into my pillow.) But I will go to a club tonight, as Eva recommends the band (something about the "chorus of the prostitutes"?), and i should go clubbing at least once while i'm here. It's at a place called Propaganda, which is KV's only year-round club (though a number of other ad-hoc ones pop up for the festival).
And what about the films, you ask? They've all been good, except for a couple of duds, and several exceptional ones. The only one I had to walk out on, was a documentary called "Christopher Colombus: The Enigma", by renouned Portuegese director Manoel de Oliveira - who, i believe, recently turned 100. I had a vague recollection of seeing something else of his, and liking it. But this film was just a humourless guy in different stages of his life, dragging his wife around to every historical monument or ruin that had anything to do with Colombus - who, he was out to prove, was born in Portugal. They would walk up to some statue, and the guy would spout off for several minutes about the significance of it. I don't even find this form of tourism interesting to do, let alone watching someone else go through it. Manoel, what were you thinking?
The highlight of the fest so far for me was, to my surprise, a Canadian film. I don't usually like Canadian films, but Guy Maddin is definately a category to himself. Although I don't usually like his films that much either, i like what he seems to be trying to do. i like his style a lot, just not the execution. But this film, called "My Winnipeg" - a poetic rumination on his love/hate relationship with the city he's lived his whole life in - I liked better than his other work. It's got some moments that drag, but there are also some inspired sequences. I'm not sure the Czech audience liked it much, though. There were a number of walkouts, and it only received tepid applause afterwards. I don't blame them; Maddin doesn't make it easy for people to like his films - often blurry, black and white, badly acted. If you can see through the warts, though, there's treasure.
The first film I saw was "In the City of Sylvia". I was attracted to the screening because it was advertised as having little dialogue, and i often like films that emphasize their power as a visual medium over a literary one. It wasn't great - not enough happened for my tastes - but i did enjoy it because it so closely mirrored aspects of my own life right now. It featured a guy wandering around a city in France, travelling alone, sitting in cafes and looking intently at the people around him, all talking. The envelope of silence that he moved within, amidst the chattering of the world around him, felt very much like my reality of late.
There has also been a midnight series of English horror films from the 1930s - 1950s. I've seen a couple of these: "The Man Who Changed His Mind" about a brain surgeon who discoveres how to implant the mind of one in another's body; and "Peeping Tom", the controversial film about the maker of snuff films that apparently destroyed director Michael Powell's long and illustrious career.
One of the best, and the most brutal, films I've seen is the Russian tale "Gruz 200". It depicts a 1984 USSR so dark, evil, and corrupt as to be unimaginable to someone with my background. There are scenes in it i hope to soon forget, but never will. This film totally obliterated the feeling of tranquility I had been floating on after having a sauna that afternoon.
I don't know if it's just this festival, or that, since reading "Haunted" I'm noticing it more, but the great majority of the films here are dark. Drug addicts, war, rape, murder, adultery - you name it, it's dark subjects that seem to constitute most of the films. i used to have more tolerance for this fair, but find I'm growing more desperate for any films that offer light, joy, happiness. Why is it that people like to be told stories about all the worse stuff that can happen to people? I'm not looking for total cotton-candy fluff; i just like films that balance the light and the dark. Two perfect examples of films with this sort of balance are "Burnt by the Sun" and "Heavenly Creature" - both films on my top ten list. That's what I like. Show me the lows, but show me the heights too. And it doesn't have to end on a high either. Both those films i mentioned start high and end tragically. But i find that way too many films just concentrate on the darkness, to the almost total exclusion of the light. And i don't want to see that anymore.
I realized recently that my history is repeating itself in strange and incomprehensible ways. After the canoe trip 11 years ago that inspired the idea for this trip, I went to the Vancouver Film Festival and engaged in the legendary spree of cinematic gluttony mentioned before. Now i find myself at another film fest after another canoe trip. What can it all mean?
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