Guests at KVIFF to include Harvey Keitel

Actor and winner of the 2004 award for outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema HARVEY KEITEL will be a guest at the 50th Karlovy Vary IFF. At this year’s festival he will be accompanying Paolo Sorrentino’s new film Youth (2015), in which he plays a lead role alongside Michael Caine.

Harvey Keitel grew up in Brooklyn. His professional acting career began in off-Broadway theatres from which he worked his way to Broadway itself, debuting in Death of a Salesman. He came to film thanks to director Martin Scorsese, with whom he made several pictures at the outset of his career, including Mean Streets (1973), Alice Doesn´t Live Here Anymore (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976). In the mid-1970s he starred in Ridley Scott’s historical drama The Duellists (1977), and later joined forces with Scorsese again for the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), where he played Judas. In 1991, Keitel was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in Bugsy. In the 1990s he came across another director who significantly influenced his career, Quentin Tarantino, with whom he made the films Reservoir Dogs (1991) and Pulp Fiction (1994). The same period saw a riveting performance by Keitel in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) and another collaboration with Ridley Scott in Thelma and Louise (1992). He worked again with Campion in 1999 on her film Holy Smoke.

His filmography includes Hollywood mainstream pictures like U-571 (2000), Red Dragon (2002), or National Treasure (2004), as well as many independent films that have been buttressed by his performances, for example Bad Lieutenant (1992) by director Abel Ferrara, for which he won the Independent Spirit award for best actor, or Wayne Wang’s Smoke (1995), which won a Silver Bear at the Berlin IFF in 1995. Keitel also played the main role in Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) by director Theo Angelopoulos, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the IFF in Cannes. He very often lends his support to young directors or takes part in producing their films, as was the case with Three Seasons (1999) by the young Vietnamese director Tony Bui. He also has worked with the inventive Wes Anderson as an actor in his films Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

Harvey Keitel was not only a guest at the 2004 Karlovy Vary IFF, but was also one of the first figures of world cinema to agree to film one of the festival trailers.