By Howard Feinstein

The old section of Karlovy Vary, a town which caters to tourists and those seeking medicinal effects from some of the town’s 60 springs, is beautiful, quaint—and restored. One of the most visited spots in the Czech Republic, it is surrounded by large woody patches and gorgeous old mansions at a slightly higher altitude. You don’t have to go too far, however, to see the rest of the town. Much of it is charmless, depressing, smacking of working-class people trying to stay out of poverty. Few visitors see this part of the city, as the spas, chic hotels, and nice restaurants are grouped together. It’s Disneyland with texture.

What is distinctive about the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (June 30-July 8) is its showcasing of Czech and other Eastern European films. There is an “East of the West” competition comprised of films from all over Eastern Europe and a panorama of Czech production from the past year. A few of the Czech movies get upgraded into East of the West or the international competition.

In the International Competition the Golden Crystal went to Laurie Collyer’s Sherrybaby (Best Actress went to Maggie Gyllenhaal for the same film) and Jan Hrebejk’s Beauty in Trouble (Czech Republic) and Christmas Tree Upside Down (Bulgaria) by Ivan Cherkelov and Vassil Zhivkov won the jury prizes. In the East of the West Competition Milena Andonova’s Monkey in Winter (Bulgaria) took the honors and in the Documentary Competition award was given to In the Pit, by Juan Carlos Rulfo (Mexico) and Life in Loops (A Megacities RMX), by Timo Novotny (Austria).

The festival is large, with a plethora of programs. Sundance at Karlovy Vary anyone? As they recently did at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, they trotted out some of their more acclaimed features. The festival had a section of Matthew Barney films, British film 2000-2005, French films about youth, and, as usual, Midnight Screenings and the Forum of Independents (including So Yong Kim’s In Between Days, Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart, and Kyle Henry’s Room). Horizons and Another View were comprised of a sampling of international cinema from the past year, as was the annual Variety Critics’ Choice strand of 10 features, a must-avoid for Karlovy Vary regulars. A forum entitled Docu Talents From the East presented finished or nearly finished documentary projects to western industryites, who were also the valued audience at an East of the West panel showcasing sections of new fiction films. Out of Competition was the disappointingly slight opening night film, Time, by Korean maverick Kim Ki-duk, a perhaps consciously superficial work about two lovers who separately get cosmetic surgery to impress each other.

There were tributes to John Huston, D.A. Pennebaker, and Slovak director Martin Holly. Awards for outstanding contribution to world cinema went to New Line founder Robert Shaye, veteran Czech director Jan Nemec, and—sit down—Andy Garcia, in honor of his directing debut, The Lost City. I don’t know how many people have seen Garcia’s futile attempt to capture on film a mythical Cuban paradise under the dictator Batista, before his family lost all of their numerable privileges at the time of the revolution. It is truly one of the worst films I have ever seen. Garcia stars, of course. Guess they were so desperate for celebs that a C-lister would suffice.

Like the residential areas of Karlovy Vary, a majority of the Eastern European features spread across the festival’s sections are bleak. According to program director Julietta Zacharova, “That’s how western countries see us, as people who need help.” Does that mean that these films are made with an eye toward a western audience, or that they are just a reflection of a reality that everyone recognizes? She approvingly quotes a friend, who felt that westerners would not respond to a particular film: “They won’t like it. It’s not dirty enough. There are not enough poor and unhappy people.”

My own feeling is that Eastern European directors are generally more educated and have a stronger philosophical bent than their western counterparts, especially in America. As a result, they write and helm works that reflect a frequently harsh reality. It’s been only 15 years since the eastern bloc opened up to the west, and a plethora of problems has entrapped those caught between a socialism in which the state takes care of one’s basic needs and a mutant form of capitalism, in which a few have become wealthy quickly, while most others have lost much of their security.

Jan Hrebejk, whose Divided We Fall and Up and Down have helped put contemporary Czech cinema on the map, addresses this chasm in the widescreen Beauty in Trouble, the country’s most highly anticipated film this year. It has some major problems, not least being the tendency to fall into stereotypes and to overdetermine characters, but it is emblematic of the limbo state of Eastern Europe. The flood that ravaged Prague a few years ago causes a working-class family to lose most of what they owned. The husband becomes part of a stolen automobile racket and gets caught. In the jail’s waiting room his beautiful but uneducated wife meets a much older, cultured Czech expat who lives on an estate in Tuscany. Somewhat improbably he falls for her. She becomes torn between the practicalities of having someone of means take care of her kids and her longing for her husband. In an interesting twist, she connives to have it both ways.

People caught in the socioeconomic rut find other ways to adapt in Something Like Happiness, winner of the Golden Conch at San Sebastian, by Bohdan Slama (The Wild Bees). Three people who grew up together in the same gray tower block in a faded industrial town face new hurdles as adults. Anna Geislerova, who also plays the wife in Beauty in Trouble (for which she won best actress), does a fantastic turn as a single mother of two who loses her mind and becomes institutionalized. Her friend Monika decides to raise the kids herself. The third in the group, a scruffy young man named Tonik, is in love with Monika and sees helping her with the children as a way to win her heart. He moves into a rundown family farm. With little to their name except the two boys and mutual affection, Monika and Tonik try to make a go of it.

Grayest of all is the Polish Crossroads Café, by Leszek Wosiewicz. The film is not good, and it has an annoying soundtrack (“Poverty and misery/All of it shitty”), but the characters illustrate Zacharova’s point. A poor old woman wants her children to earn money no matter what the consequences. Her daughter is the mistress of an elderly senator. Her disappointing son cannot find work in Warsaw, and ends up helping to rob a bank. A 12-year-old prostitute neighbor whose mother is her pimp befriends him. All of the sets are wrist-slitting sad, the people without a glimmer of hope.

Fortunately, a wry sense of humor sometimes keeps these films from falling into complete despair. Czech directors Pavel Gobl and Roman Svejda’s Railyard Blues doesn’t come together, but it does neatly combine amusing caricatures of workers at a rail station with astute observation of the minutiae of their daily lives.

A more successful example is Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest, a brilliant Romanian film with long takes and hilariously understated gestures that won the Camera d’or in Cannes for best first feature. Set in the small town of Vasliu, the film focuses affectionately on eccentrics and those who tell white lies to get what they want, even if it’s alcohol. A typically eastern block school band suddenly goes Latin, to comic effect. The denoument is a TV talk show in which two townspeople, an 80ish pensioner who is the town’s Santa, and a history teacher with a drinking problem and a penchant for borrowing money, are interviewed about what they did the day in 1989 when the dictator Ceausescu was murdered. Both men claim they ran out into the town square and were therefore part of the revolution. People who call in, however, recall that both were getting smashed in a bar. As everyone argues, a woman phones in and asks if they know that the snow has arrived. They go outside and look at the beautiful white blanket beginning to cover their city. Nothing else matters; it’s best to move on than to dwell on past mistakes.

A unique blend of Jan Svankmajer, Guy Maddin, and Buster Keaton, Czech director Tomas Vorel’s Skritek is a funny, surreal film with no dialog and a wicked scatological thrust. Vorel makes do with grunts, exaggerated facial gestures, music, and natural sounds. To top off the disjunction with reality as we know it, he fuses naturalism with animation, speeds up and slows down the action, and adds as a main character a fairy-tail gnome that is the title character. A family, proles of course, has its problems: The butcher father is having an affair at work, the supermarket-cashier mom cracks up and seeks revenge, the daughter has difficulties at school, and the son prefers smoking weed to being a butcher’s apprentice. Ultimately the parents reconcile but the daughter runs off with Skritek. There is magic in even the dreariest situations.

The fact that the late Krysztof Kieslowski’s masterpiece The Decalogue, set in a housing project, was a failure in Poland while it won plaudits in the West reinforces Zacharova’s idea about what we expect from eastern films. I know this because of a private screening of the documentary Still Alive: A Film About Kieslowski, by Polish director Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz. It is filled with interviews with and about Kieslowski, footage from his oeuvre, and informative passages about his ups and downs in eastern and western Europe (he wanted Poland to be a part of western Europe), his personal demons (depression), his complex political worldview. I’m not sure if it is because Kieslowski was my hero, but this well researched film was the highlight of my visit. It also made me sad, because Kieslowski has been gone for 10 years and because it inadvertently makes the point that there are few geniuses at work in cinema today. Now THAT’S depressing.