An exhausting nine-day whirlwind of films, parties, celebrities, scorching sunshine and sudden rainstorms drew to a close this week here in Karlovy Vary, the fairy-tale spa town nestling among heavily wooded hills in the north-western corner of the Czech Republic. Judi Dench, John Turturro and other stars have already passed through the town's annual film festival to pick up awards and promote movies.
It may not have the worldwide media profile of Cannes or Sundance, but Karlovy Vary is one of Europe's oldest and most elegant film festivals, growing in critical stature over the two decades since the former Czechoslovakia emerged from more than 40 years of Soviet communist domination. The ghosts of fallen empires are everywhere here, from the hulking Cold War concrete edifice of the Hotel Thermal, which serves as the festival's hub, to the palatial theatres and sumptuous screening rooms scattered throughout the town's picturesque historical centre.
This year's festival showcased almost 200 films from more than 50 countries, a quarter of them world premieres. More than 120,000 tickets were also sold to a youthful and palpably keen audience. Every screening I attended was busy, even for obscure films, and most were full. If you ever fear that the serious-minded film fan is an endangered species, just come to Karlovy Vary in July. The enthusiasm is infectious.
Films from the Middle East were scattered through the programme, including the winner of the festival's biggest prize, the Crystal Globe. The director Yossi Madmoni's Restoration is a low-key but beautifully observed family drama, set in a modern-day Israel where Jews, Arabs, Europeans and Asians coexist. There is no political subtext here, just a superbly crafted, understated story about emotional and generational tension.
Also impressive was Man Without a Cell Phone by the Palestinian-Israeli director Sameh Zoabi, an agreeably sunny family comedy about the everyday struggles of middle-class Palestinians living inside Israel. Funding for Zoabi's film came from Qatar and Belgium, but also from Israel's ministry of culture, which seems odd, given the story's core message about ingrained anti-Arab prejudice in Israeli society. "It's very simple," the director told me at his packed festival premiere. "They didn't read the script!"
Several European and North American films in Karlovy Vary also had strong Middle East connections. The French director David Dusa's Flowers of Evil, an experimental drama about a budding romance between an Iranian girl and a Parisian Muslim boy, combines fictional scenes with online footage from the bloody street clashes triggered by Iran's 2009 presidential elections. The complexities of East-West culture clash was also a key theme of the intriguing but overlong documentary Arab Attraction, a study of an Austrian feminist and art teacher who converts to Islam to marry a Yemeni man 20 years her junior.
Meanwhile, the Canadian director Ivan Grbovic's official competition entry, Romeo Eleven, offered a sensitive and absorbing portrait of a young man from a Lebanese immigrant family struggling to cope with disability and parental pressures in contemporary Montreal. The star, Ali Ammar, gives a highly impressive performance for a non-professional novice. Grbovic's film earned a Special Mention from the festival's Ecumenical Jury.
Now separated into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the former Czechoslovakia was always a highly respected cinematic nation, producing master directors such as Milos Forman and Jiri Menzel, both of whom appeared in the short promotional films that opened each screening in Karlovy Vary. Inevitably, work from both sides of this once-single state was strongly represented in the festival programme. Indeed, the Special Jury Prize actually went to a rare joint venture between the two countries, the director Martin Šulík's Gypsy, a stark drama about Slovakia's oppressed Romany minority, which is already proving to be politically controversial after Slovak Railways refused to carry advertisements for the film.
Another noteworthy homegrown production at the festival was the film-directing debut of the celebrated playwright, anti-Soviet dissident and former Czech president Vaclav Havel. A little stagey but full of impish humour, Leaving is Havel's adaptation of his own 2007 stage play about the former leader of an unnamed country facing pressure from the new regime to vacate his grand, government-owned mansion. Containing homages to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and Shakespeare's King Lear, this bittersweet absurdist satire is also peppered with knowingly autobiographical nods to its author. Havel even makes a small cameo appearance, while his actress wife Dagmar Havlova plays a starring role.
Karlovy Vary has a long tradition of showcasing films from the former eastern bloc, which even share their own separate competition category. Despite the long history of tension between the two countries, Russian cinema also had a strong presence at this year's festival. Enjoying its prestige premiere was the Russian-American director Victor Ginzburg's hallucinatory comedy Generation P, a sprawling adaptation of the author Viktor Pelevin's cult magic-realist novel about the new breed of gangster oligarchs and political puppet-masters who filled the power vacuum during Moscow's post-communist boom years. This surreal roller-coaster ride through the Wild East is dense and confusing in places, but never boring.
An even bleaker portrait of contemporary Russia came across in Igor Voloshin's commended competition entry Bedouin, a stark drama starring Olga Simonova as an impoverished Ukrainian woman who strikes a deal to become a surrogate mother for a shady St Petersburg businessman in order to finance her dying daughter's cancer treatment. When her scheme unravels into violence and treachery, she takes a last, desperate trip to the Bedouin regions of Jordan in search of the magical curative powers of camel's milk. A bleak story, but well-acted and grippingly told.
Two hard-hitting British features also had European premieres at Karlovy Vary. The directing debut of the actor Paddy Considine, Tyrannosaur is a harrowing portrait of blighted inner-city lives which owes a clear stylistic debt to Ken Loach's school of hard-knuckled social realism.
The grizzled Scottish actor Peter Mullan, a Loach veteran, plays a violent alcoholic trying to claw back some of his shattered life by taking Olivia Coleman's troubled charity shop worker under his protective wing. Which may sound dauntingly grim on paper, but Considine keeps the action compellingly gritty, and clearly knows how to wring powerfully authentic performances from his fellow actors.
Memorable for different reasons is the director Ben Wheatley's Kill List, a hair-raising thriller about two British veterans of the Iraq war who decide to exploit their military skills to earn big money as hit men. But it soon becomes clear that the main anti-hero, played by Neil Maskell, is a borderline psychopath with anger-management problems. Wheatley pulls off an audacious gear change for the film's closing section, switching from gritty crime drama to nightmarish horror-movie bloodbath. Many of us stumbled from the Karlovy Vary midnight screening in shell-shocked silence. And yes, that is a hearty recommendation.
Speaking of midnight movies, some of the most enjoyable films at the festival were the outlandish comedies scheduled for one-off late-night screenings. Shot in the style of The Blair Witch Project, the Norwegian director Andre Ovredal's Troll Hunter follows a group of amateur filmmakers on a search to find Norway's notorious fairy-tale monsters. Which they do, with hilarious but brutal consequences.
The veteran Dutch star Rutger Hauer also earned big laughs as a vengeful tramp in Jason Eisener's Canadian comedy Hobo With a Shotgun, an enjoyably excessive spoof of trashy 1980s action films featuring groaningly corny dialogue and lashings of gore.
Hardly nourishing material for highbrow film buffs, admittedly. But after a week in Karlovy Vary dominated by hard-hitting social realism and vintage eastern-bloc bleakness, this delirious double-barrelled blast of comic-book violence felt like welcome light relief.
Rashid & Rajab
Director: Mohammed Saeed Harib
Stars: Shadi Alfons, Marwan Abdullah, Doaa Mostafa Ragab
Two stars out of five
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2025 Fifa Club World Cup groups
Group A: Palmeiras, Porto, Al Ahly, Inter Miami.
Group B: Paris Saint-Germain, Atletico Madrid, Botafogo, Seattle.
Group C: Bayern Munich, Auckland City, Boca Juniors, Benfica.
Group D: Flamengo, ES Tunis, Chelsea, (Leon banned).
Group E: River Plate, Urawa, Monterrey, Inter Milan.
Group F: Fluminense, Borussia Dortmund, Ulsan, Mamelodi Sundowns.
Group G: Manchester City, Wydad, Al Ain, Juventus.
Group H: Real Madrid, Al Hilal, Pachuca, Salzburg.
How to watch Ireland v Pakistan in UAE
When: The one-off Test starts on Friday, May 11
What time: Each day’s play is scheduled to start at 2pm UAE time.
TV: The match will be broadcast on OSN Sports Cricket HD. Subscribers to the channel can also stream the action live on OSN Play.
Skewed figures
In the village of Mevagissey in southwest England the housing stock has doubled in the last century while the number of residents is half the historic high. The village's Neighbourhood Development Plan states that 26% of homes are holiday retreats. Prices are high, averaging around £300,000, £50,000 more than the Cornish average of £250,000. The local average wage is £15,458.
COMPANY PROFILE
Company name: BorrowMe (BorrowMe.com)
Date started: August 2021
Founder: Nour Sabri
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: E-commerce / Marketplace
Size: Two employees
Funding stage: Seed investment
Initial investment: $200,000
Investors: Amr Manaa (director, PwC Middle East)
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Learn more about Qasr Al Hosn
In 2013, The National's History Project went beyond the walls to see what life was like living in Abu Dhabi's fabled fort:
The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young
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Four-day collections of TOH
Day Indian Rs (Dh)
Thursday 500.75 million (25.23m)
Friday 280.25m (14.12m)
Saturday 220.75m (11.21m)
Sunday 170.25m (8.58m)
Total 1.19bn (59.15m)
(Figures in millions, approximate)
Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
A MINECRAFT MOVIE
Director: Jared Hess
Starring: Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa
Rating: 3/5
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
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Under 19 World Cup
Group A: India, Japan, New Zealand, Sri Lanka
Group B: Australia, England, Nigeria, West Indies
Group C: Bangladesh, Pakistan, Scotland, Zimbabwe
Group D: Afghanistan, Canada, South Africa, UAE
UAE fixtures
Saturday, January 18, v Canada
Wednesday, January 22, v Afghanistan
Saturday, January 25, v South Africa
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
Essentials
The flights
Emirates and Etihad fly direct from the UAE to Geneva from Dh2,845 return, including taxes. The flight takes 6 hours.
The package
Clinique La Prairie offers a variety of programmes. A six-night Master Detox costs from 14,900 Swiss francs (Dh57,655), including all food, accommodation and a set schedule of medical consultations and spa treatments.
THE SPECS
Engine: 6.75-litre twin-turbocharged V12 petrol engine
Power: 420kW
Torque: 780Nm
Transmission: 8-speed automatic
Price: From Dh1,350,000
On sale: Available for preorder now
The specs
Engine: 4.0-litre flat-six
Torque: 450Nm at 6,100rpm
Transmission: 7-speed PDK auto or 6-speed manual
Fuel economy, combined: 13.8L/100km
On sale: Available to order now
