KVIFF 2025: Sand City, The Visitor, Better to go crazy in nature | Festivals and awards

It’s always surprising, watching films from around the world in a festival as diverse as the 59th International Karlovy Festival this year, how the thematic parallels are starting to emerge.

Between the main competition of the festival, with 12 first of films in competition for the prestigious Crystal Globe, and its proxima section of the sidebar, dedicated to the daring works of emerging filmmakers and established authors, there was an abundance of films that thought about the secret relationships between people in search of meaning and the places they find themselves.

A force of an international festival lies in the way it offers participants a passport to see the world and the films of this dispatch –“Sand City” winner of the Grand Prix of the Proxima section; “The visitor”, ” who earned the best ex-aqueo director in the Crystal Globe competition; And “Better to go crazy in nature”, “ Who finally won the Grand Prix in the Crystal Globe competition – was far away, from the city of Dhaka to scan sand at the Côte Balte opposite and to the Woody Massé of Šumava in the Czech Republic. However, in the three films, the objective is not a simple tourism but a kind of richer emotional cartography, elucidating the interior worlds informed by its individual experience of locations and landscapes.

Mahde Hasan is slowly attractive “Sand City” Who contributed to nearby, follows two foreigners in the densely populated city of Dhaka, whose paths only momentarily intersect, but whose life is inextricably linked in a deeper and existential way. In the vaguely post-apocalyptic sprawl of Dacca, the sand is still present, swirling with surface dust in polluted air and anchored in rapid urban development. William Blake’s opening quotes (“to see a world in a grain of sand”) and TS Eliot (“These fragments that I accelerated against my ruins”) states the central idea of the film: this sand itself shapes the realities, desires and destinies of people in search of permanence in a impermanent place, the citizens always in search of a city.

Tell parallel stories and opt for a deceptively free style that signals the myriad of overlapping possibilities between the two but leaves these largely unrealized numbers, “Sand City” between Emma (Victoria Chakma), a woman from a group of ethnic minorities in Dhaka and Hasan (Mostafa Monwar), a man who belongs to the majority population. Below in daily routines that offer no stay of their solitude and desolation, the two characters began to fly sand. While bringing her scooter back to the house of an indescribable office, Emma just brings together enough for her cat’s litter plateau. At the same time, Hasan – who works every day in a glass factory – allows you to fly enough sand and silica equipment to your workplace to make your own glass, with the idea of possibly starting a business.

For both, the sand is a fundamental element of life in Dacca, fueling the construction of the city while reflecting its transitional, as it slides in their hands as they reach out to grasp it. When Emma finds the cut finger of a woman in the sand, her nail painted in red, she is pierced by the mystery of whom she was and what the macabre fate struck her; It becomes a kind of memory or Talisman, the vestige of another lost soul. While Hasan becomes cheeky in his efforts to melt the glass sand for his entrepreneurial gain, elsewhere, he risks insecurity of work and perhaps more.

Wrapped in shadows and covered by the smog, “Sand City” finds moments of shimmering beauty in Dacca twilight melancholy, richly tactile and thoughtful images of the film slowly falling together like so many glass shards in a kaleidoscope. Turned by the director of gifted photography Mathieu Giombini (“Lingui: The Sacred Bond”), this hypnotic film accumulates an overwhelming feeling of mood and texture, its spectral atmosphere of anomie and alienation even lounging like its good grains of start of the start of the narrative.

Hasan quotes Pedro Costa and David Lynch as conscious influences, but, as criticism in the field in Karlovy vary to buzz over this proxima section, a colleague comparatively compared him to the first works by Tsai Ming-Liang, whose flexible extinctions of the urban drift have been populated in a similar way by ghosts and sensitive to spaces, find it difficult to suppose.

A feeling of similar loneliness – and, certainly, the influence of Tsai – Pervade Vytautas Katkus’ “The visitor”, “ A start of director who contributed for the Crystal Globe in the main competition of Karlovy Vary. But what faces the protagonist Danielius (Darius Šilėnas) while he returns to his native Lithuania after a long absence is less a desire to put rooted than his opposite: a silent acceptance that you cannot go home. A new father in Norway, he returned to the small seaside resort where he was raised, after the death of his father a year earlier, with a clear goal in mind: to sell his parents’ house, to give up this assertion in a place where he has long left. The separation of links will not take much, Danielius seems to think, so this is a surprise when he decides to extend his stay.

Exploring the Baltic coast, meeting the inhabitants he knew, this foreigner in a familiar land wanders in his environment as if he were a patient awake with a coma, recovering memories wherever he must reconcile with the emotions that the modified circumstances now cause them. There is a deep sadness in his pilgrimage, but Danielius also seems to find comfort to revisit the community which raised it, going up on an internal map of the places which shaped him in a way in which he had never been fully aware.

A director of photography accomplished in Lithuania, Katkus – who also co -wrote the script with Marija Kavtaradze (“slow”) – brings a sweet and contemplative contemplative sensitivity to “the visitor”, who plays in long photos of people through spaces until they are quietly starting to live. Often, it seems that Katkus simply brings his camera with him on a long walk in an area he knows intimately, rest on what captures his interest or attracts a feeling deeply buried on the surface. Danielius returned to this region to the slow closure of his summer season, and the feeling of a resort emptying before his eyes is the one he savor more now – perhaps with power – that he has reasons to identify with tourists as well as locals.

Paradoxically, while Danielius sails in the inevitability of his departure from this place, our affinity for the people who live there begins to deepen. Two potential buyers look at the apartment, then ask if they can stay a while; It is important, it is said, to take time before making a decision that will shed light on the form of things to come, and Danielius agrees that they can live there with him until the place begins to feel at home. A meeting with Vismante (Vismerė Ruzgaitė), a neighbor who walked his dog, later led him to establish a friendship with his father (Arvydas Dapšys), following as a shadow through the woods, contained in driving in a direction rather than walking aimlessly by himself.

“The Visitor” arises on quiet moments of these characters attracting in nature, falling asleep at the beach, practicing conversations in a vacant karaoke bar while night falls around them. The melancholy sadness of the film becomes funny and particular while Danielius tries to exist for a certain time outside his life alongside people who really live theirs, even staying in a hotel “with the possibility of stretching”, always unable to let go, at least until it is dressed in this place long enough to feel it again in its bones.

“Better to go crazy in nature” Also concerns the sacred relationships between people and the place, although Miro Remo’s documentary approach to invite his audience in the unconventional life of twin hermit living deeply in the Šumavan forests of the Czech Republic makes the portrait in a sharp, warm and attractive way.

Remo’s film, which won the Grand Prix of the Crystal Globe competition from Karlovy Vary, is less a biographical account of Franiišek and Ondřej Klišík, identical brothers in their sixties who spent their whole life in the same small village near the borders of the southern Farm-Show of Czechia, and which rarely seem to leave the Farmhouse Dilapid Whitehhouse where they share everything. The brothers occasionally brought women back to their dilapidated home and thus erected a score to give themselves at least the semblance of intimacy. But these days have long passed into account their unusually narrow relationship; Sooner or later, women seemed to realize that “separating the twins is like breaking a mirror”, we are told.

Ballet and graying, with beards that swing like Numbus clouds, twins are easily told by Franišek – who refer to Fanta and his brother that Ondra – was an arm of years earlier in a sawmill accident. This detail is highlighted, with a suspicion of magical realism, by the Off voice attributed to Nandy, a majestic bull. The intimacy of the bond of the twins with their animals, whether it was the cow that chewed with pleasure the beard of Ondra or the faithful dog which always makes both senses between them, resembles a crucial part of what illuminates and supports their eccentric existence.

The twins spend their days in mutual isolation, whether drinking, smoking or engaging in the reflection of the arms, and they share a voracious appetite for philosophical reflections, reflecting on the cycles of death and life with the grandiloquence of a poet. Whether it’s walking in primitive forests or swimming in glacial lakes, these crisp curmudgeons often prefer to wander naked in the wild, to their most comfortable, exposed to the elements.

A Slovakian filmmaker, Remo and his crew spent 60 days with the twins over a period of five years, although “better Go mad in nature” was inspired before a story in a book of the same name by the journalist and Czech author Aleš Palán, who had gone to the region to tell the life of Hermit living in society. The book offers more knowledge of how it has become, although Remo includes archive images which ultimately clarify that twins played a role in the velvet revolution, pamphletering to mobilize support against the communist regime, and were even decorated for their actions during this period, only to declare their overestimation of belief in the ideals of another type by spending their life. This useful movement in.

For the most part, however, Remo’s film maintains this story outside the framework, rather preferring to fight in the alternative bucolic, absurd and sometimes melancholic lifestyle of the alternative lifestyle of twins, listening to their simple wisdoms and observing their moving behavior with clear fascination. “Better to go crazy in nature”, therefore, becomes both a pungent and poignant regional popular type, evoking small moments of magic by slowing down long enough to notice all the details of two born foreigners who have transformed nature into their own private sanctuary.