Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic - The 44th Karlovy Vary Film Festival opens Friday with films marking the 20th anniversary of the implosion of communism taking centre stage at what is one of the world's oldest movie showcases. Set against the backdrop of the Czech Republic's fairytale spa town, the Karlovy Vary festival has emerged in recent years as a major venue for feting Central and Eastern European cinema with a slew of movies from the region included among the 19 world premieres to be screened in this year.
"Central and Eastern Europe is our territory" said Karel Och, a Karlovy Vary Film Festival programmer. "This is a strong year in terms of quality," he said.
The Eastern European line-up for this year's eight-day festival includes Polish director Robert Glinski's Piggies, which touches on the grim world of sex tourism and Tirana-born Artan Minarolli's Alive.
Minarolli's film tells the tale of young student who finds himself caught up in Albania's primitive blood feuds.
Famed Czech-born Hollywood director Milos Foreman's jazz opera A Walk Worthwhile is also to premiere at this year's festival.
But along with its regular East of the West competition for movies from the former Eastern bloc, Karlovy Vary this year includes a section devoted to movies about the 1989 uprisings across Central Europe that brought to an end more than four decades of communism.
This includes the 1991 movie Sweet Emma, Dear Boebe from Hungary's Istvan Szabo about two former Russian language teachers struggling to qualify as English teachers in the new post-communist world so they can return to the social status they once enjoyed.
Of the 14 movies competing for Karlovy Vary's top honours, the Crystal Globe for best feature film, four are from Central European directors.
A total of 226 films from 64 nations are to be shown at the festival in Karlovy Vary, which is held between the Cannes and Berlin movie festivals, which are mounted earlier in the year, and the Venice festival that is staged at the end of the European summer.
Festival organizers are also confident that long-term arrangements with sponsors means the global economic crisis will not dampen spirits at Karlovy Vary as it had somewhat at the Berlin and Cannes festivals.
With its history as a spa town dating back to the 14th century, Karlovy Vary has over the centuries welcomed guests from European culture, power royalty such as JS Bach, Sigmund Freud, Tsar Peter the Great and Karl Marx.
More recently, celebrities from a different world have been making their way to the small resort town near the German border - such as Renee Zellweger, Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Danny DeVito and Gael Garcia Bernal.
The star power at this year's festival includes Spanish-born Hollywood actor Antonio Banderas, who is to introduce his film Summer Rain and to receive a Festival President's Award.
Both American actor John Malkovich and French film and theatre actress Isabelle Huppert are to be also honoured with festival Crystal Globes for their contribution to world cinema.
In addition, US screenwriter and director Paul Schrader is to present his new film at the festival.
The scriptwriter of Martin Scorsese's legendary Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, Schrader's movie Adam Resurrected is about a one-time circus artist and musician who ends up as a patient in an Israeli mental institution for Holocaust survivors.
But the Karlovy Vary festival has also over the last two decades sought to promote itself as a showcase for new American cinema.
This year's festival kicks off with The Greatest, the debut movie from US director Shana Feste, which is a wrenching story about how a family's tranquil suburban life is turned upside down by the unexpected death of a son.
More than ten years after Darren Aronofsky made his first visit to the Karlovy Vary festival, the New York-born director's The Wrestler is to be screened at the festival as part of a selection of movies from the world's leading film festivals. The Wrestler won the 2008 Venice Film Festival.
As well as screening Los Angeles director Scott Sanders' parody Black Dynamite, Karlovy Vary will be also be paying tribute to US director and screenwriter Alan Rudolph.
