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Kviff Eastern Promises, the Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s industry section and film market, announced its winners Tuesday. Ștefan Bîtu-Tudoran’s “Battalion Records” won the Eurimages Co-production Development Award worth 20,000 Euros, with the Eurimages Special Co-production Development Award for a Ukrainian project going to Yelizaveta Smith’s “In Vacuo.”

“Battalion Records” is Bîtu-Tudoran’s feature debut and follows a group of young artists who hijack Romania’s oldest music studio to stage a cultural revolution, taking the staff hostage to film a musical manifesto against Romania’s cultural decay. The jury called the film a “bold debut that confronts the decay of culture,” saying they were pleased to award the project “because sometimes, to make people listen, you must turn things upside down – and this absurdist heist comedy does so with rebellious energy.”

“In Vacuo” trails a young archaeologist who returns to her hometown to sell her missing father’s apartment,...

It’s been more than half a century since the Czech New Wave heralded the arrival of a fresh cinematic movement in the former Czechoslovakia. Today’s rising talents — from diverse backgrounds, working across a range of styles and media — showcase an industry that’s increasingly embracing the world.

Here are 10 Czech Talents to Watch (in alphabetical order):

Michal Blaško

Working between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Blaško landed on the international radar when his short film “Atlantis, 2003” premiered at Cannes’ Cinefondation, before launching his feature debut “Victim” in Venice’s Horizons strand. He’s currently teaming up again with “Victim” scribe Jakub Medvecký on the coming-of-age drama series “Cowgirl.”

Kristina Dufková

The Prague-born animator made a splash with her well-received debut feature “Living Large,” which premiered in competition at Annecy en route to a lengthy festival run and a spot on the Oscar shortlist for Best Animated Film.

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Kviff) is expanding its Industry Days programme, which runs from July 6-9, with a greater focus on Central European film co-production and new events focused on series development.

The previous Works in Progress pitches will be replaced by a Cee-focused Kviff Central Stage showcase, a new initiative in cooperation with the national film institutes of eight Central European countries.

Thirteen fiction films by established filmmakers from these countries that are in late stages of development, in production or post-production will be showcased on July 8. The projects will be revealed later in June.

The Midpoint Institute...

Greta Stocklassová’s documentary films Hans Blix, aged 97, and asks about his role in the war, Wmd, and why his world of diplomacy has now disappeared

At the age of 97, entirely lucid, still writing books and physically spry enough to be shown swimming in a Norwegian lake, former Un weapons inspector Hans Blix has given an extended interview to the Czech-born Swedish film-maker Greta Stocklassová about his life and times, about George W Bush Jr, Saddam Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction that were not there. The result is insightful and a vivid time capsule for the grim and mendacious era of the “war on terror”, during which Blix was tasked with discovering the truth about Saddam’s supposed weapons. The film is also unexpectedly spiky, with Blix at one stage threatening to walk out, as Stocklassová presses him on his apparent fence-sitting, then as now, insisting on an...

Pope Francis, Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Un chief Ban Ki-Moon will be honored at the upcoming Cinema for Peace gala in Berlin on February 19.

The long-running gala run by the Cinema for Peace Foundation will be accompanied by the inaugural World Forum on the Future Of Democracy, Tech and Humankind.

The latter event will run from February 18 to 19 at the Allianz Forum next to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin with the aim of promoting the renewal of democracy and freedom at a time when both are under threat.

The Cinema for Peace Foundation was created in 2008 as an international non-profit organization with the goal to foster change through film. Over the years it has worked with a host of stars including Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney.

Clinton and Ban will attend the February 19 gala in person while Pope Francis will be shown receiving his award in a recorded video.

Launching an ambitious program of compelling global and Czech work, the 27th edition of the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival opened on Tuesday, kicking off six days of more than 350 film screenings by veteran and new filmmakers.

Fest head and founder Marek Hovorka, who launched the event in his hometown in 1997, introduced what is now Central and Eastern Europe’s main event for docs, defining the fest mission as “a celebration of films, image, sound, gestures and diversity.”

The films selected this year are “all very original,” he told the opening gala audience, and show filmmakers “perceive the world very differently.”

The fest, raising its curtain in the location that remains its home, the communist-era Dko “house of culture,” as the pre-1989 regime dubbed such multi-purpose spaces, attracts for its launch hundreds of guests seated at white-decked tables, sipping local wine.

Opening night moderators embraced an ironic take on AI,...

Czech-Swedish filmmaker Greta Stocklassa was only eight when the War on Terror began in 2001. In the years that followed, fellow Swede and former Un weapons inspector, Hans Blix, became a central figure in the investigation into weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In her documentary “Blix Not Bombs,” Stocklassa interviews Blix, now 94 years old, about the period running up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq 20 years ago.

In the docu, Blix describes his meetings with George W. Bush and Tony Blair, his frustration when Colin Powell gave his pivotal speech in the Un Security Council, and his feeling of emptiness when the U.S. started the invasion, despite his reports that his team had found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Blix also argues that there was a butterfly effect that the Iraq War triggered: the invasion resulted in the overthrow of the Iraqi regime, and the breakup of the Iraqi army,...