40th Karlovy Vary Film Festival

The festival of Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic (country which after the downfall of communism is now located in the center of Europe) — the festival builds a (traditional) bridge between East and West and offers still a marvelous possibility to see recent films from Eastern Europe (in particular Russia, see our reports). Headed by our colleague Eva Zaoralova, the event focuses as well on new world cinemas. Our jurors discovered an interesting subject treated in several entries: the necessity to leave one’s own country and to look somewhere else for a new place, home and ‘heimat’, One of these films on immigration won the Critics Prize: Chinaman (Kinamand) by Henrik Ruben Genz (Denmark/China, 2005). The film “somehow avoids most of the obvious traps of such a subject,” writes Ronald Bergan in his review. “Although it deals with the attempts of a Chinese woman to join her family in Copenhagen by arranging a marriage of convenience with a Dane, in order to hoodwink the strict immigration authorities, the film is more concerned with personal relationships.”