Out of the Past

In this unusual action sci-fi comedy a secret parallel reality exists behind the television screen – some sort of world “behind the mirror” filled with corresponding images of us that siphon off our strength. Sheepish outsider Olda is going to have to battle his vigorously demanding double – with the remote slung pretty damn low around his waist. World premiere of the remastered version.

Two boys hiding in the woods after escaping from a death transport during the war, their fear of capture, their hunger and cold, their increasing fatigue – the film mediates all these various states with a raw intensity and with great physical urgency. For his part, the director conveys their situation with strongly stylised film devices using a narrative form akin to a stream of consciousness.

“Can we tell your story anew?” Mark Cousins asks Orson Welles, and then proceeds to look upon this iconic figure of 20th-century film from a practically unknown perspective: as the creator of hundreds of drawings and paintings to which Cousins gained exclusive access thanks in part to Welles’s daughter Beatrice. Cousins conceived his unconventional portrayal of the man behind Citizen Kane as an audiovisual letter to the visionary maestro, celebrated for his immense powers of imagination.

Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Coming Home and Being There. Four exceptional titles from Hal Ashby that rank among the best that 1970s American cinema had to offer. This documentary portrait presenting the life and work of a remarkable filmmaker features a number of Ashby’s collaborators, among them Jane Fonda, Jeff Bridges, Alexander Payne and Norman Jewison.

This documentary about Jiří Menzel offers a sincere and unobtrusive tribute to his mastery as a film and stage director. Czech-Swiss filmmaker Robert Kolinsky prepared the groundwork for his picture over the space of several years, during which time he acquired testimonies from eminent European figures, who ponder Menzel’s specific type of humour and its deeper significance. The chief take on the given theme is, however, the protagonist’s own.

After Roman Polanski and Richard Pryor, acclaimed documentarist Marina Zenovich turned her attention towards matchless comedian and respected dramatic actor Robin Williams (1951–2014). His life and career are relayed to us via never-before-seen archive footage and reminiscences from friends and colleagues, together creating an image of an endearing and wild eccentric regarded by many as the wittiest man on the planet.

This year he would have turned 100. Commemorate the anniversary of one of the most important filmmakers of all time with a documentary by a German director, who investigates Bergman and his artistic legacy, his closest cooperators, and the contemporary artists whom he significantly influenced.

The trenches of World War I provide for a captivating backdrop to the drama of Corporal Hoferik. In his devotion to the Habsburg Monarchy, he fanatically carries out his military orders, but he ultimately suffers the Empire’s disfavor. The director brings uncommon intensity to bear as he vividly portrays this anomalous and historically oft-repeated paradox.

Thirty-year-old Patricia Highsmith must have felt honored when the great Hitchcock chose to film her very first novel Strangers on a Train (1950). He must certainly have been drawn to a character often found in his own work – the dangerous psychopath hiding his predilections behind a flawless mask. Here, shortly before his untimely death, the talented Robert Walker appears as the dashing and irresistible ladies’ man.

Andrei Tarkovsky described the visual merits of Mikhail Kalatozov’s films as outstanding and saw them as inspirational for his own work. In an era of faceless wartime epics, this drama, focusing on a simple tale of tragic love, appeared as a revelation – not only in its theme but in its expressive style, which ensured that the image, editing and sound also had a significant creative role to play in the film.

The social melodrama White Paradise, with its classic story and advanced technical quality, was a huge success at the box office in 1924, thanks in part to the involvement of Der starke Vierer (the strong four), one of the most distinctive creative teams to come out of early Czechoslovak cinema: director and actor Karel Lamač, cameraman Otto Heller, actress Anny Ondra and, later on, scripter Václav Wasserman. White Paradise will be screened at the festival with live musical accompaniment.

Fifty years ago Stanley Kubrik’s cult sci-fi picture shook the conventions of its genre and influenced the technical side of filmmaking (and more) for decades. Thus the chance to see it in its newly restored version is a no-brainer. The mysterious monolith of extraterrestrial origin and the calculating HAL 9000 onboard computer star in this epic poem about human evolution.