Variety Critics' Choice
Midnight Screenings
Czech Films 2015–2016
A Female Take on Mexico
Tribute to Otto Preminger
People Next Door
Seven Close Encounters
Out of the Past
Prague Short Film Festival Presents
Representatives of the Karlovy Vary IFF and the Sirius Foundation have put together a new thematic section entitled People Next Door, whose programme reflects the ideas underlying the Walking People campaign (Chodící lidé).
The Walking People project is one of the activities promoted by the Sirius Foundation and its aim is to show the majority public how to communicate with people with disabilities and how to interact with them. The campaign is founded on three statements formulated from a disabled person’s standpoint:
“Don’t think that we’re different. If someone lives with a disability, it doesn’t mean they think, consider and experience things differently from everyone else.”
“Don’t be shy about coming forward! Talk to us and treat us the same way you would anyone else, and if you’re not sure about something, then just ask.”
“Don’t feel sorry for us. It won’t help us in any way; we don’t want pity.”
The Walking People campaign is in harmony with the long-term endeavours of the Karlovy Vary IFF which, for the past sixteen years, has enabled access to the festival for people with restricted movement via its No Barriers project (Kino bez bariér).
On the following pages you’ll discover more about the six films (People Next Door is sharing the seventh title, the black comedy Kills on Wheels, with the East of the West Competition), whose creators are offering a specific, often very surprising take on the lives of people with physical disabilities. They adopt an intriguing approach that realigns our notions of what’s normal – our world or the world of the disabled – and, in so doing, they highlight the absurdity of this kind of thinking.
The Karlovy Vary IFF and the Sirius Foundation
A spirited psychologist accompanies a group of invalids to Ingvild’s house where Geirr, her self-destructive husband, has been wheelchair-bound for two years. Geirr, however, rebels against his wife’s attempts to rescue their marriage via positive thinking therapy. A black comedy about dealing with stifling compassion and false sincerity once and for all. Awarded Best Director at KVIFF 42.
Fictitiously elaborating on Asta Philpot’s real-life trips to a wheelchair-accessible Spanish brothel and his advocacy of prostitution as one sexual-expression option for the disabled, Come As You Are is a likable seriocomedy with assured direction. Winner of the Grand Prix at Montréal and the Audience Award at KVIFF.
When a US Marine captain is called to Vietnam, his attractive wife (Jane Fonda) suffers from persistent loneliness. But an encounter with a paraplegic war veteran (Jon Voight) turns her life upside down. The three-time Academy Award-winning drama focuses on the endless cruelty that war inflicts on the lives of innocent people even though the armed conflict isn’t presented in the movie.
A wealthy quadriplegic needs a new personal assistant, and so he organizes a series of job interviews at his luxurious mansion. But what happens when, indifferent to his own well-being, he rejects several qualified caretakers and surprisingly hands the lucrative position over to a jovial guy from the suburbs who only came to ask for a stamp to satisfy the unemployment office? One of the most successful French box office hits of recent years, this lively comedy has the answer.
This Oscar-nominated documentary investigates the lives of the members of rival American and Canadian wheelchair rugby teams who are determined to do whatever it takes to win. The unrestrained spectacle embraces the dissonant sounds of crashing wheelchairs, hard rock music, sentimentality, and even raw emotion.
Any friendship between a woman and two men almost always smacks of rivalry. But can the duel for the lady’s favor be a fair one when Ben is bound to a wheelchair and Christian is his new assistant? A mild tragicomedy from familiar Karlovy Vary guest Dietrich Brüggemann on the essence of true friendship and love.
First-hand brews throughout the year.
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