Viggo Mortensen, Daniel Brühl, Clive Owen to Receive Karlovy Vary Film Festival Honors

Viggo Mortensen, Daniel Brühl and Clive Owen will receive Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) honors at the Czech fest’s 58th edition this year.

Organizers revealed on Wednesday that actor-director Mortensen will receive the KVIFF President’s Award on opening night, June 28, and also present his feminist western The Dead Don’t Hurt, which he wrote and directed, as the opening film of the fest.

German-Spanish star Brühl will also be a guest of the fest, receiving the KVIFF President’s Award and presenting his directorial debut Next Door. And British actor Owen will, at the closing ceremony on July 6, receive the KVIFF President’s Award.

Last year’s KVIFF honorees included Alicia Vikander, Ewan McGregor and Russell Crowe, who also got the bucolic spa town of Karlovy Vary rocking when he showed off his musical chops in an open-air concert with his band Indoor Garden Party.

This year, its 25th year on the scene, British electronic music band Kosheen (Hide U) will perform in the free opening concert at the festival. “The band, which thanks to previous concerts in the Czech Republic has a strong fan base in the country, will perform the greatest hits from its repertoire,” organizers said.

Adding more star power is Benicio del Toro who stars in this year’s KVIFF trailer, which will debut, as is tradition, during the opening ceremony of the fest. The actor and producer was a recipient of the KVIFF President’s Award in 2022.

Big-name filmmakers will also be in the KVIFF spotlight. Steven Soderbergh will present two films in the Kafka retrospective at the fest. They are Kafka and Mr. Kneff. “Festival audiences will have the unique chance to see both films presented in person by their creator, who is known to only rarely accept invitations to such events,” KVIFF organizers emphasized.

“The mysterious drama Kafka (1991), which Steven Soderbergh shot in Prague with Jeremy Irons in the title role, is a sophisticated blending of Kafka’s real life with fiction, although viewers have absolutely no way of knowing whether the events in the film are real or the fruits of the author’s imagination,” the fest explained on Wednesday. “Thirty years later, Soderbergh decided to re-edit Kafka to create an entirely new film. Set in Prague in 1919, Mr. Kneff is the story of a writer who uses his dead-end job as inspiration for his writing. The new version is twenty minutes shorter, with a rearranged narrative structure. In addition, Soderbergh colorized some of the scenes to more clearly differentiate between reality and the main protagonist’s imagination.”

Meanwhile, screenwriter and director Nicole Holofcener will be the focus of a KVIFF tribute and screening and introduce three of her films, namely Please Give, Enough Said and You Hurt My Feelings.

Other filmmakers ready to descend on Karlovy Vary and present their latest films include Michel Franco, Juho Kuosmanen, Sergei Loznitsa, Rúnar Rúnarsson, Daniele Luchetti and Ti West.

This year’s KVIFF competition jury is led by indie film producer Christine Vachon. She will be joined by Australian actor Geoffrey Rush, Hungarian director Gábor Reisz, Icelandic poet, novelist and screenwriter Sjón and Czech actress Eliška Křenková.

The 2024 Karlovy Vary fest runs June 28-July 6.