The Karlovy Vary Film Festival announced it will showcase three retrospectives for its 41st edition: a Focus on British Films, a tribute to John Huston and Visions of Seven, a section that will feature seven French films all dealing with adolescence and the search for identity and a place in this world.

The oldest work of the Visions of Seven section is Claude Chabrol’s Les cousins (The Cousins), which was the prolific filmmaker’s second work, originally released in 1959. Jumping the sixties, the next two films to be shown are from Claude Miller (La meilleure façon de marcher/The Best Way to Walk, 1975) and legendary director François Truffaut, whose L’argent de poche (Small Change) from 1976 will also be part of the line-up. From the nineteennineties there will be two films: the already classic 1994 release Roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds) from André Téchiné and the 1999 entry La vie ne me fait pas peur (I’m Not Afraid of Life) from Noémie Lvovsky. From the current decennium programmers have opted for a duo as well: Les amants réguliers (Regular Lovers), the three hour black and white epic that chronicles the 1968 student revolution in Paris from Philippe Garrel, and the much lighter comedy La première fois que j’ai eu 20 ans (The First Time I Turned Twenty), a 2004 entry from Lorraine Levy, which concludes the French retrospective.

The Focus on British Films will showcase six British features and seven short films that have come out in the last five years but have not been distributed in the Czech Republic. The films include Ken Loach’s The Navigators from 2002, Paul McGuigan’s 2000 feature Gangsta No. 1, 2001’s Me Without You from Sandra Goldbacher and the recent Oscar Wilde adaptation A Good Woman.

Last but not least the festival organises a retrospective of John Huston’s films, on the occasion of his birth centenary this year. The American filmmaker who passed away in 1987 is responsible for such classics as The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Misfits and The Man Who Would Be King, all of which will be screened in Karlovy Vary, together with three other titles from his extensive oeuvre.

The Karlovy Vary Film Festival takes places yearly in the spa town of the same name in the Czech Republic, and will run this year from June 30 through July 8. It is considered the most important Eastern European festival and comes in importance on the festival stage after the holy trinity of Cannes, Venice and Berlin.