Just as the street cleaners finished sweeping away the festal debris of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the city finds itself hosting another celebration of cinema, the 3rd Annual Fresh Film Festival. But, if the splashy international exhibition is an excellent indicator of where contemporary film is at, the Fresh Film Festival is a preview of where cinema is going.

The Fresh Film Festival is a five-day trip into the future, as student filmmakers from around the globe descend on the posh spa town to screen their work. As with the international festival, there are numerous juried competitions that aid winners with substantial help on future projects in terms of both needed cash and technical support.

Twenty-three films have qualified for the main competition this year, with student films coming from Poland and Mexico, with three each; Finland, the Czech Republic and Taiwan, with two each; and Estonia, the United Kingdom, Russia, Singapore, Canada, Spain, Belgium, Hungary, Israel and France. The United States is conspicuous by its absence throughout most of this festival.

Two other competitions worth following will be the one for animation (with a jury headed by the renowned Czech illustrator Petr Sís) and the one among the Visegrád Four countries (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary). If you are interested in simply coming to Karlovy Vary to soak up atmosphere, you could do worse than plunging into the festival's Dive-In Cinema, where a sizable pool with inflatable chairs promises to be a godsend if the weather becomes another parody of the tropics. The Dive-In bill will include screenings of Michel Gondry's documentary Dave Chappelle's Block Party.

Along with providing financial and technical assistance, the Fresh Film Festival is actively engaged in furthering the careers of top student directors. Two of the most promising young directors from the past two years, Romanian Corneliu Porumboiu and Russian Nikolai Khomeriki, both found success at Cannes this year with their first full-length features. Fresh Film will be honoring both young men in the newly established "Becoming Masters" series with screenings of the directors' student work followed by their Cannes-winning films: Porumboiu's East of Bucharest and Khomeriki's 977.

As for a Czech future master to watch, it might be worth catching Marta Nováková's first full-length movie, Marta. The recent FAMU graduate's film is a gritty and minimalist psychodrama set within the ravaged landscape of an unnamed war.

If you miss the festival screenings, fear not. Bonton has picked up distribution rights, and Nováková's debut will be given big-screen treatment in Prague multiplexes come Aug. 30.

Serious neophytes will find a host of workshops and seminars connected with the festival, where they can learn the techniques of the trade from working professionals. There will also be a salute to veteran Czech director Jan Němec, with screenings of his classic new-wave film Diamonds of the Night, along with more recent work, Toyen and Night Talks with My Mother. Němec will also screen three films that were personally important to his growth as a filmmaker: Václav Krška's Dalibor (1957), František Čáp's Sign of Anchor (1947), and Jan Kádár's Kidnapping (1953). As one of the few scraps of evidence that American film exists, there will also be a screening of Sidney Lumet's latest film, Find Me Guilty, with Vin Diesel getting a chance to act seriously in this mob-trial tale.