Two romantic dramas will bookend the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
The A-list Czech festival will kick off its 56th anniversary event with opening film Superheroes, the new feature from Italian director Paolo Genovese (Perfect Strangers) on July 1, and will close, on July 9, with a gala screening of George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing.
Jasmine Trinca (The Son’s Room) and Alessandro Borghi (Suburra) star in Superheroes as a mis-matched couple — she’s an impulsive cartoonist, he’s a by-the-book physics teacher — whose superpower is finding the strength to keep their relationship together over more than a decade.
In Three Thousand Years of Longing, the star-crossed couple is made up of Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. She’s a lonely academic visiting Turkey; he’s a thousands-year-old genie she uncorks. Three Thousand Years of Longing premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last month. Superheroes was a 2021 holiday release in Italy.
Karlovy Vary on Wednesday also added three Cannes releases to its 2022 lineup: Lukas Dhont’s Jury Grand Prize winner Close — an intimate coming-of-age tale about the friendship between two 13-year-old boys, Riley Keough and Gina Gammell’s crowd-pleasing War Pony, about two young Oglala Lakota men growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which won Cannes’ best first film honor, and Brett Morgen’s David Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream.