Daily Tiger #1 (English)

DAILY TIGER 44th International Film Festival Rotterdam #1 Thursday 22 January 2015

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Peter Greenaway Stienette Bosklopper Force Majeure/Turist

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Films of the Day: War Book Gluckauf

foto: Bram Belloni

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Signals: Bruce McClure Hubert Bals Fund Made in Taiwan

ENGLISH EDITION

“We already have a great platform at the festival to look at new developments and changes in the world around us through cinema” – outgoing IFFR head Rutger Wolfson

Rotterdam on Demand This year IFFR introduces two new measures designed to boost audiences for festival films. IFFR chief Rutger Wolfson, in charge for the last time this year, explains all to Nick Cunningham.

director Rutger Wolfson. “So there is this huge problem. People are still going to cinemas, but increasingly only to see a handful of films that are the most popular titles. Everybody is going to see Boyhood or Spiderman but our films are having a hard time.”

taking away a lot of the obstacles to help filmmakers release their films.”

“I think this is a huge step,” he continues. “During the festival, we have special industry events lined up to explain how it works, but we also want to learn more from filmmakers and rights-holders to develop it even further.”

Ask anybody who has been reasonably active in the independent film sector over the past few decades, and they will confirm that once IFFR personnel identify a need for radical change, then change is never slow in coming. This is in the DNA of an event that gave us CineMart, the co-pro market that revolutionised the business of international production finance, and the Hubert Bals Fund, which continues to support, finance and champion filmmakers from developing countries.

Numerous other co-pro events and similarly targeted funding mechanisms have grown up over the years, but the root of all such initiatives is planted here, in Rotterdam.

Tiger Releases

IFFR Live

To address this fundamental disconnect, IFFR and leading Dutch broadcasting technology company Infostrada have developed the Tiger Releases initiative that provides filmmakers and rights-holders the opportunity to directly release their films on global Video on Demand platforms, in the process guaranteeing them highly favourable returns in revenues – “50% and up,” according to Wolfson. “The current situation is that if you are an individual filmmaker or rights-holder and you want to release your film on iTunes, for example, it’s virtually impossible as you need an aggregation partner – somebody who holds a licence to release films on these platforms, and you need some quite expensive and complicated technical support to reconfigure the film files into such a form that they can be released on these platforms,” Wolfson stresses.

This year also sees the first IFFR Live programme, also aimed squarely at audience development. Four films receiving their world premieres at IFFR and one receiving its European premiere will screen in 40 cinemas across seven European territories and on VOD. The augmented Euro-wide audience can then participate via twitter in all post-screening Q&A events. Selected films include Ramon Gieling’s Erbarme dich – Matthäus Passion Stories, which explains the sense of devotion many people feel for Bach’s masterwork, and Bernard Bellefroid’s Melody, which tells of the relationship between a surrogate mother and the woman for whom she is carrying a baby.

Potential audience

This year the festival has another sector firmly in its sights – distribution – and is determined to tackle head-on the thorny issue of how and why the vast number of superb films that delight and inform festival audiences are rarely granted any meaningful opportunity to do the same for non-festival audiences. “There is a huge potential audience for these films, but they have a very hard time getting a release, not only in Rotterdam or the Netherlands – it’s a global problem,” points out IFFR

Huge step

Now, when filmmakers are selected for IFFR, they can opt to have their films recoded for leading VOD platforms at a fraction of the cost. “Tiger Releases will advance these costs and then recoup them from first sales. If the costs are not recouped, then we take the loss, but we are okay with that. We are

“IFFR Live is really taking off. The participating cinemas are very enthusiastic and very active in marketing and promoting it on twitter and social media. I saw pictures yesterday of a cinema in Poland being decked out in Tigers,” Wolfson points out of the programme devised in association with Fortissimo Films, TrustNordisk and Doc & Film, with financial assistance from Creative Europe. “This is a new type of collaboration between the festival and sales agents which is creating continues on page 3 higher visibility for film, so it is very exciting.”

FLYING SOLO

Insanely popular Japanese singer Shibutani Subaru, who heads up the band Kanjanai Eight, performs solo for the first time this evening (Thursday 22 January) in the Oude Luxor, adjacent to nocturnal festival hangout Bar Central. Subaru stars in Yamashita Nobuhiro’s La La La at Rock Bottom (screening in Spectrum) which world premieres in the same venue before the gig. According to sources, fans (and the Japanese media) are flying in from across the world to see Subaru’s sold-out solo debut.

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Shibutani Subaru in La La La at Rock Bottom

INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

Rotterdamse Schouwburg Schouwburgplein 25, Rotterdam

Rotterdamse Schouwburg First Floor

www.IFFR.com

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Exhibition: Newsroom

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Less is more

The festival’s new Limelight section consists of 20 international films that will receive a Dutch theatrical release later in the year, while the Bright Future and Spectrum sections show a strategically reduced number of films this year. “Many professionals are interested in the new films we have found, so we have made a clearer distinction between the new premiere films and the highlights from other festivals. And we have limited ourselves to fewer films. Less is more.

The fewer films you select the higher you set the bar.”

Beyond the hype

At a time when liberal cultural institutions are required to articulate their support for the artist’s inalienable right to freedom of expression, how does Wolfson define the IFFR cultural offer? “There is a lot of engagement within the programme we present, with everything that is going on in the world. We have an Everyday Propaganda programme, one on Feminism, and one on the 24-hour-attention economy. I think we are certainly engaged with the world as a festival, perhaps more so than other cultural institutions, but we try to take a different angle. We try to look beyond the hype of the news cycle and operate without the benefit of hindsight, but still try to look at everything that is going on and address these subjects in the programmes we are presenting. I guess we are not directly responding to the Charle Hebdo disaster, as I think we already have a great platform at the festival to look at new developments and changes in the world around us through cinema, or with cinema as a starting point.”

The art of noise (and light) Experimental filmmaker Bruce McClure returns to IFFR for a retrospective of his work. By Melanie Goodfellow

Experimental filmmaker and performance artist Bruce McClure, who is the subject of an IFFR retrospective this year, advises people attending his live events to bring their own earplugs. The artist, who moulds mesmerising, disorientating live events out of old film stock – sometimes scratched, sometimes superimposed – through banks of modified projectors, admits his immersive performances can he noisy. “The volume is where I have control,” says McClure. “I like to let rip.” McClure will recreate a series of his past performances during IFFR, including one involving a triple 16mm projector and featuring superimposed stock from a 1930s documentary about birds. “The idea of a retrospective is slightly problematic for me because I am more interested in looking forward than looking back, but when I make new things I do take the time to document them so I can recreate them again,” says McClure.

As well as the live performances, McClure has also created an ambitious installation, Courting Daylight

in Saving Darkness, at the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art. Taking the visitor on a journey from obscurity to dazzling bright light over three rooms, McClure has drawn on several sources of inspiration for the show, including filters on windows, the seventeenth-century painting Interior With A Woman At The Virginals and the late Italian architect Giuseppe Terragni’s Divine Comedy-inspired Danteum building, inspired by Dante’s afterlife classic but never built.

The artist has stayed away from using his trademark projectors in the installation or playing recordings of his work on a loop. “I don’t believe in leaving them [the projectors] as foundlings on someone’s doorstep where people come and go and watch them as they want,” says McClure. “I’ve said in the past, and whether I believe it or not isn’t important, to abandon projectors in a gallery space is cruel. I don’t want to animate the things and treat them like babies. I’m not sure if it’s an ethical issue but it doesn’t seem right. Putting the projectors in a setting like this would be aesthetising it.”

The installation opens tonight with a special performance at Worm of McClure’s new audio-

Bruce McClure in Opposition Brings Reunion

visual work Suffusion of Fine Glass Transom and Leadlight Panes, based on the Warner Brothers logo. He will then present his recent single-screen projection Textiles Through the Ages, complete with original soundtrack. McClure’s associate Alex Mendizabal will round off the performance with a banging noise set.

Signals recalls Taiwan New Cinema Taiwan New Cinema is remembered at IFFR with a special Signals Regained programme screening vintage 1980s films by the likes of Hou Hsaio-hsien and Edward Yang. By Melanie Goodfellow

IFFR programmer Chinlin Hsieh, who selects films from France and French-speaking Canada for the festival, will be sitting in the director’s chair this evening (Thursday). Taiwanese, Paris-based Hsieh’s documentary Flowers of Taipei opens the Regained Special: Made in Taiwan sidebar, exploring Taiwan New Cinema.

The short-lived movement, which sprang up against the backdrop of the country’s pro-democracy wave of the early 1980s, included the likes of Hou Hsaio-hsien and Edward Yang in its ranks. “Taiwan only became democratic and lifted Martial Law in 1987. We’re talking about the period around 1982 to 1983 when everything was boiling,” says Hsieh. “It’s very difficult to talk about it like a movement. There was no manifesto like Dogma. It happened almost accidentally.

These young filmmakers just happened to be ready at the right moment.”

Commissioned by the Taiwanese government’s Department of Cultural Affairs to mark the 30th anniversary of Taiwan New Cinema, Hsieh’s film looks not so much at its history but rather at the subsequent impact its productions had on filmmakers around the world. “I made it like a road movie, travelling to different countries and cities around the world to ask filmmakers and artists and critics about what they think about this cinema and what its legacy was 30 years later,” says Hsieh. Her interviewees include filmmakers Olivier Assayas, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang, festival director Marco Muller and critic and programmer Tony Reyns.

Alongside her documentary, Hseih has selected seven works regarded as emblematic of the New Taiwan Cinema school, including Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers, capturing the intertwined lives of a hoodlum’s girlfriend, a photographer, a writer and a doctor; Chen Kun-hou’s recomposed family comedy Growing Up and The Sandwich Man. It was the latter film, says Hsieh, that switched her on to the movement. The portmanteau film featured the work of Hou Hsiaohsien, Tseng Chuang-hsiang and Wan Jen and tackled poverty, materialism and American Imperialism. “I

The Sandwich Man

remember going to see The Sandwich Man. It was very revealing to me. At that time, there were only propaganda films, popular melodramas, action movies out of Hong Kong or Hollywood movies in the cinemas,” says Hsieh. “There was no genuine national cinema linked to local sensitivities. New Taiwan Cinema bought this into the culture. It was so fresh for all of us. Prior to these films, intellectuals didn’t go to the

cinema – it was viewed simply as cheap entertainment – so this was really a crucial moment in the cultural development of the country,” she adds.

The Sandwich Man screens at IFFR tomorrow (Friday) at 16:30 in Lantaren Venster 6, followed by a post-screening discussion chaired by Aaron Cutler. On Saturday at 16:00 in LantarenVenster, Chinlin Hsieh discusses Flowers of Taipei in the Critics’ Talk.

HBF to sow co-production seeds IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund looks set for a busy festival as it launches its new HBF+Europe scheme. Melanie Goodfellow reports

The Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) will give its new HBF+Europe co-production and distribution initiative its first festival outing at this year’s IFFR. The two-part scheme supports European producers taking minority stakes in projects hailing from eligible HBF territories and also aims to foster new distribution strategies for international co-productions.

ever-changing ecosystem of independent film production and distribution in the developing world.

The new initiative, however, marks something of a departure. Aside from its Hubert Bals Fund Plus scheme, aimed at Dutch producers, existing funding strands mainly give direct grants to filmmakers and producers from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe. “It’s a move into co-producing,” says HBF manager Iwana Chronis. “It also means we’ll be collaborating a lot more with CineMart. It’s a natural progression.”

Throughout its 27-year history, HBF has continually tweaked its activities to stay relevant in the

HBF+Europe was one of five beneficiaries in the first round of Creative Europe’s international

La obra del siglo

Another Trip to the Moon

co-production funds scheme, which also included the IDFA Bertha Fund and the TorinoFilmLab’s TFL Distribution. Chronis and HBF coordinator Janneke Langelaan will present the new scheme to industry guests at an event entitled ‘Coproducing Beyond Europe’ next Tuesday (Jan 27). “We put out a call for the minority co-production support just before Christmas. We haven’t received too many applications yet but expect it to get busy after Berlin”, says Chronis. The maximum grant is €55,000 per film. The call for the distribution support will open in May 2015. Offering up to €20,000 per project, the scheme is aimed at individual rights-holders or consortiums of buyers

Court

INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

with an interesting strategy for distributing international co-productions.

At IFFR, the fund has 19 films from its so-called Harvest – the name it gives to its annual yield – in the programme this year. Five of these are in competition: Laura Citarella and Verónica Llinás’s La mujer de los perros (Dog Lady), Jakarawal Nilthamrong’s Vanishing Point, Ismail Basbeth’s Another Trip to the Moon, Carlos Quintela’s La obra del siglo (The Project of the Century) and Juan Daniel F. Molero’s Videophilia (and Other Viral Syndromes).

HBF-backed festival hits Chilean Martín Rejtman’s Dos disparos (Two Shots Fired) and Miroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe, which won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize in Cannes last year, screen in the new Limelight section. Slaboshpytskiy’s new project The Luxembourg, set against the backdrop of Chernobyl’s nuclear wasteland is among five HBF-backed projects due to be presented at CineMart.

A new screening and Q&A event entitled Brave Talk, revolving around films on human rights, will also feature a number of HBF-supported films, including Indian Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court and Héctor Gálvez Campos’ NN.

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Circe of life Veteran Dutch producer Stienette Bosklopper (owner and managing-director of Circe Film) is turning screenwriter and has written two projects already in advanced development. By Geoffrey Macnab

Bosklopper (whose production credits include Wolfsbergen and Brownian Movement) will be at this week’s IFFR CineMart in a dual capacity – as screenwriter and producer of Nanouk Leopold’s new feature Cobain. The €1,600,000 film, which has already received backing from the Netherlands Film Fund, is being coproduced with Waterline Film.

“It’s part of a personal development you have at a certain stage in your career,” the producer says of her foray into screenwriting. “I had been working with a lot of writers and directors. Somehow, there was an urge to contribute on a different level … to my own amazement, it is going very well. It comes quite naturally and I have

the feeling that I will be continuing doing this.”

Cobain is the story of a teenage boy with a drug-addicted mother who has just become pregnant. The boy is determined to save his unborn brother. Shooting is planned for the autumn of 2015. Cinemien is already aboard as distributor and A Private View is the Belgian co-producer.

The second screenplay on which Bosklopper is working is Avrupa, a collaboration with fast-rising young writer-director Sacha Polak. This is an epic drama about a Turkish family who leave their home to build a new life in the Netherlands. It is being developed as both a 6-part TV series and a feature film with Molly Malene Stensgaard, best known as Lars Von Trier’s editor on such films as Nymphomaniac and Melancholia.

Sacha Polak also has another new project at CineMart, the English-language film Vita & Virginia about the relationship between writers (and lovers) Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. The €6

million film, being made by Mirror Productions and Viking Film, is scripted by Eileen Atkins.

Other projects being developed at Circe Films include David Verbeek’s new feature Goeree, a story set in a fishing village during an economic downturn. “It’s a typical Bruno Dumont-style [drama] about youngsters in the south of Holland, their life, drugs, the church,” Bosklopper states.

Circe is also the Dutch co-producer on Niles Atallah’s Rey, about a French lawyer who sets out to become King of Patagonia. This is produced by Lucie Kalmar of Mômerade (France).

Meanwhile, Circe is about to go into production next month on Martijn Maria Smits’ Waldstille (working title) about a man returning home to an uncertain welcome after time in prison for causing the death of his girlfriend in a drink-driving incident. The film, now fully financed, is being supported through the new Dutch cash rebate incentive. The distributor is Contact Film.

Force Majeure

Slippery slope

By Lee Marshall

A sardonic, serious, funny, precision-controlled psycho-comedy drama inspired by the selfishness of our survival instincts, Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure is his best yet. Though it screened in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, this impressive film, revolving around a Swedish family’s unexpectedly conflictual skiing holiday in the French Alps, would not have looked out of place in competition.

Already sold in several territories, Force Majeure – which also goes by its original title, Turist – looks set to notch up several more deals. Imperfect human behaviour is still under the microscope here, as in the

director’s previous work, but though at times he likes to watch his specimens wriggle on pins, or stick pins into each other, there’s a new sense of compassion as well as a striking visual unity in this new film – with cinematographer Wenzel doing a superb job of framing the comedie humaine against indifferent nature in a series of razor-sharp fixed-camera shots.

Combine this with Ostlund’s knack for rescuing comedy out of the jaws of drama, and you have a title with surefire appeal for discerning arthouse audiences.

Ostlund began his career as a director of skiing films, but it’s not so much the beautifully shot ski

scenes that impress in his vision of the unnamed resort where model Scandinavian family formed of handsome father Tomas (Kuhnke), quietly radiant mother Ebba (Kongsli) and two blonde children Vera and Harry (the real-life Wettergren siblings) are taking a winter break. It’s the sense of the slopes and the machinery that services them, as a menacing beast with its own mind, as remote-controlled avalanche explosives boom and snowploughs roar in the night with no visible drivers. Groomed for unease (a mood underscored by repeat bursts of that famous thunderstorm riff from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons), we

New Greenaway projects in the pipeline Prolific British auteur Peter Greenaway (whose new feature Eisenstein in Guanajuato premieres in competition at the Berlinale next month) is about to start work on Walking to Paris, his biopic of sculptor Constantin Brancusi (which he is making with Dutch producer and former Rotterdam festival stalwart Kees Kasander).

By Geoffrey Macnab

27-year-old Brancusi walked through Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and France.

It took him eighteen months. “Along the way, living off the land as his years of being a shepherd boy had taught him, he had adventures – comic, violent, sexual and romantic – and certainly formative of his future sculpture, constantly building sculptures out of found materials – wood, stone, sand, snow and ice – leaving a trail of abandoned experimental temporary sculptures across the landscapes of Europe,”

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Greenaway comments of the project. Shooting is due to begin in March in Switzerland.

Later this year, Greenaway is also hoping to shoot Food For Love, his long-gestating version of Death In Venice.

He describes it as telling: a parallel and contemporary and alternative story of that boy on the beach in the Thomas Mann/Luchino Visconti story as a 50-year old adult; a criminal with his own private Vivaldi quartet, living off successful sexual blackmail.”

Meanwhile, Greenaway is also plotting a second film about legendary Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein with some of the actors who appeared in Eisenstein in Guanajuato. “We have a working title – The Swiss Hoax – with a secondary title of The Eisenstein Handshakes,” Greenaway comments. The new film will tell of how, in 1929, Eisenstein was invited to “what may be called the very first world film festival in La Sarraz in Switzerland, where a gathering of international film critics, filmmakers, cineastes and cinema commentators discussed and argued cinema

for seven days, primarily along the old familiar lines of ‘is cinema art or commercial entertainment?’”

Eisenstein is supposed to have made a film on this subject in Switzerland called Storm over La Sarraz, although this may have been a hoax. The Russian and his travelling companions Tisse, his cameraman, and Alexandrov, his assistant and co-writer, were pursued by the Swiss police since Soviets were illegal in Switzerland. They were also reportedly blackmailed into making Frauennot – Frauenglück – the very first Swiss film – about abortion. “The first film festival and the first Swiss film provide an opportunity to discuss the formative 1920s in filmmaking – art and commerce – and quote innumerable films from The Jazz Singer and Joan of Arc and Flaherty and Murnau to films by Muybridge, Duchamp, Man Ray, Clair, Richter, Dali and Bunuel,” Greenaway comments.

Other projects Greenaway has in various states of development include Four Storms & Two Babies, “celebrating radical Dutch gender politics against

INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

Stinette Bosklopper

follow the family through their seven-day holiday, with each day constituting a titled chapter.

On Day 2, when the family is eating lunch on the terrace of an on-piste restaurant, a ‘controlled’ avalanche down a facing valley builds as it rushes towards the chalet. Tomas bolts in the general stampede (not forgetting his iPhone), but Ebba stays to protect the kids. There are no serious consequences – the whiteout that enveloped the terrace (and, in one of many masterful visual touches, the camera) was just powder, and when it settles life goes on as before.

Except it doesn’t. Tomas’ instinctive act of selfishness, and his refusal to fess up to it, begins to poison the couple’s relationship.

What follows is a nuanced dramatic choreography in which Ebba’s distress and Tomas’s self-delusion are exposed through spot-on body language, competitive tooth-brushing sessions and whispered not-in-front-of-the-kids arguments in the corridor outside the family’s hotel room. Ebba’s encounter with a self-assured Swedish woman in an open relationship opens a crevasse of doubt, which is further widened by a cathartic confrontation in the presence of Tomas’ hipster friend Mats (Game of Thrones actor Hivju) and his much younger girlfriend Fanni (Metelius). One of this superbly directed film’s many pleasures is the way Ostlund risks provoking out-and-out laughs from the midway point on, as the dramatic stakes heighten.

But Force Majeure never loses sight of its mandate to make us wonder how we might react in a survival scenario. The pressbook helpfully informs us that many marriages do not survive such catastrophic tests.

One wonders how many break-ups the film itself might provoke, as the after-screening discussions escalate.

Pitched at CineMart 2012

a background of the exceptional architectural Amsterdam School”, and new art movie Painters’ Wives. Greenaway describes the latter title as “a meditative fiction about Saskia Rembrandt and Caterina Vermeer, a celebratory project about two delectable and stalwart Dutch females, both painters’ wives, with their combined fifteen children – dead for Rembrandt, alive and kicking for Vermeer – with all the issues of fecundity and infecundity, infant mortality, plague, child deaths, constant pregnancies, gynaecological ignorance, Rembrandt painting corpses, Van Leeuwenhoek, Vermeer’s investigative friend, watching his sperm wriggle under the microscope – the mucky, sticky physical seventeenth-century world of fortuitous death and unpredictable birth, huge lust, but passionate uxoriousness – all recorded directly and indirectly in their husbands’ paintings and drawings.”

Greenaway also still has hopes for making Bosch, his film about that “most anarchic of Dutch painting genius Hieronymus Bosch – celebrating his anti-clerical, violent, comic anarchy.”

Films Boutique is handling sales on Eisenstein in Guanajuato.

Role-playing Armageddon In Tom Harper’s War Book, which opens IFFR 2015, a British government minister, a senior advisor and seven civil servants gather to role-play the government’s response to a hypothetical nuclear strike in the Indian subcontinent. By Nick Cunningham

Eschewing polemic, the film evolves into a study both of both class warfare and group dynamics as we are led inexorably toward the question of whether Britain would, or should, be prepared to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. What’s more, Jack Thorne’s deliciously wordy script refrains from dumbing down on political complexity as each new development within the conflict is assessed, and as each participant in the room, ghosting as a Cabinet

repulsiveness and appeal, but also suggests that the world is closer than anybody should dare imagine to some form of nuclear engagement.

War Book is almost exclusively set within the four walls of the cabinet room, which was as liberating for Harper as it may be limiting for a lesser talent.

“There were [initially] scenes set outside the room that we thought were going to be essential. We then found that we wanted to cut as much of that as possible. These scenes just took the edge off the pressure, and actually the room [became] a very important component in making it all work,” he stresses. “For me, true cinema is capturing a mood or an essence,

focusing viewers’ attention on something, and I found the restriction of being in the room meant I could really hone that down further.”

As tensions reach their peak towards the film’s end, chairwoman Philippa halts proceedings by calling for a two-minute silence. As a cinematic device this is very effective, offering a tonal contrast to the bile that precedes it. As Harper’s camera subsequently rests upon the strained faces of the room’s occupants, these moments of respite also present the audience an opportunity to reflect upon what they have seen. The inspiration for this directorial decision is surprising.

“I had a Quaker upbringing and I used to spend a lot of time in Quaker business meetings, which are quite extraordinary,” Harper explains. “If there is ever a disagreement, then someone will rise and say let’s just take a moment to reflect on this, and that could be a minute or two minutes, or it could be five minutes, until the first person feels ready to speak.

Then it is astonishing how often conflict is resolved by just a few moments of reflection. Silence is a powerful thing.”

A film about both a very specific place and a universally understood theme, Remy van Heugten’s Gluckauf is as precise about the Dutch province of South Limburg as it is broadly sympathetic regarding family ties.

ships, the director describes Lei as the “immoral father” who lacks social skills, whilst Jeffrey, having become a quasi-parent to his own father, has become amoral, such that “he doesn’t know what’s right or wrong.” In a pivotal scene in the film, we see just how far Jeffrey has strayed from any sense of a moral code, valuing the acquisition of wealth above all else.

Finding the right actor to convey Lei’s depth of feeling was essential to the success of the film, and for this Van Heugten consulted a casting agent with the intention to “find somebody who feels deeply, emotionally invested in the story.” Eventually discovering Slegers, the director describes how the

Wed 21 Jan 21:00 PA1; Thu 22 Jan 09:45 PA5; Fri 23 Jan 19:00 PA5; Sat 31 Jan 16:45 SGZ

‘true cinema is capturing a mood or an essence’ minister, must vote for or against the application of subsequent emergency measures.

Of course, given the high stakes, tension is ratcheted up to breaking point, especially when the hawkish, privately-educated and supremely self-confident Gareth argues for retaliation while State-educated and doveish Tom, from Liverpool, appeals for restraint. (Thorne’s script hints that another reason for their mutual loathing is Gareth’s penchant for other men’s wives, in this case Tom’s.) The film’s mid-section, in which Gareth attempts to seduce recorder Kate, not only serves to underline both his

Happy Families

By Harriet Warman

Focusing on Lei (Bart Slegers), father to grown-up son Jeffrey (Vincent van der Valk), Van Heugten and co-writer Gustaaf Peek establish early on that their central pair have long been dependent on each other, and that the roles of father and son have become interchangeable. Living in the shadow of his own father’s legacy and feeling the effects of a region abandoned by industry, Lei makes a living day to day hunting and selling rabbits, whilst Jeffrey prefers to peddle narcotics. When Jeffrey discovers Lei’s debt to landowner Vester (Johan Leysen), he quickly becomes embroiled in darker and darker ways to pay back what is owed.

Screening in the Hivos Tiger Awards Competition, Gluckauf showcases Van Heugten’s assured and subtle direction, which has extracted a powerful, nuanced performance from Slegers, and a hugely effective sense of place. Having grown up in Limburg, Gluckauf is something of a personal film for the director, who desired to show the contradictions of the region – that despite the commonly perceived “lovely image of Limburg”, the area has suffered greatly from the economic downturn caused by mine closures in the 1960s, now consistently appearing second only to Amsterdam for high crime rates.

For Van Heugten, Lei and Jeffrey are emblematic of a generational dynamic where unemployed men lacked the direction needed to push their own children to find careers. Developed from Peek and Van Heugten’s observations and anecdotes about paternal relation-

‘deeply, emotionally invested in the story’ actor was intensely connected to the character and could relate Lei to his own life experiences. Slegers’ commitment to the role is apparent in his raw, natural performance as Lei, showing with skill the way a seemingly childlike father eventually realises the necessity of protecting his son.

With Gluckauf, Van Heugten has successfully realised a vision of Limburg that is at once beautiful and barren, where Vester’s country estate – seen gloriously illuminated at sunset – is symbolic of a pastoral life that is now more hell than heaven, and the burden of paternal expectation is inescapable.

Hivos Tiger Awards Competition Thu 22 Jan 19:30 PA4; Fri 23 Jan 20:00 PA1; Sun 25 Jan 13:00 LUX; Tue 27 Jan 16:30 LV1; Sat 31 Jan 17:00 CI2

PRESS & INDUSTRY SCREENINGS 09.00

10.00

de Doelen Jurriaanse Zaal

TG Gluckauf Remy van Heugten 09:15 – 10:57

de Doelen Willem Burgerzaal

SP A Corner of

11.00

12.00

13.00

JJ We Are Brothers Jang Jin 11:30 – 13:11

16.00

Yamashita Nobuhiro 11:15 – 12:58

de Doelen Jurriaanse Zaal 09:15

Gluckauf [wp]

18.00

19.00

20.00

21.00

22.00

23.00

24.00

de Doelen Willem Burger Zaal TG

Remy van Heugten, Netherlands, 2015, DCP, 102 min, Dutch, e.s.

17.00

BF Banana Pancakes and the Children of Sticky Rice Daan Veldhuizen 13:30 – 14:55

Bottom

Zhang Miaoyan 09:15 – 10:49

15.00

BF The Man in the Wall Evgeny Ruman 13:30 – 15:02

SP La La La at Rock

Heaven

14.00

11:30 •oranje01•

A powerful father-son drama plays out in the ignored, impoverished Dutch province of South Limburg, which offers no opportunity for escape. Neither for the characters, who carry on an unequal struggle against their social conditions, nor for the audience. Gluckauf’s chokehold is much too firm for that.

We Are Brothers [ep] Jang Jin, South Korea, 2014, DCP, 101 min, Korean, e.s.

13:30

JJ

Two brothers separated in childhood are brought together as adults - only to find that one is now a Christian pastor and the other a shaman. Their religious squabbling undermines their search for their missing mother, a dementia patient. Jang Jin’s satire is sharp, as ever.

•blauw•

The Man in the Wall [wp]

09:15

BF

Evgeny Ruman, Israel, 2015, DCP, 92 min, Hebrew, e.s.

•geel•

One night, one apartment and one mystery. Shir wakes up in the middle of the night. Her husband hasn’t come back after taking the dog out. The dog has.

But where is Rami? Friends, relatives, neighbours and police come round and with each visit more marital secrets are revealed.

DONDERDAG 22-01-2015

A Corner of Heaven [ep] Zhang Miaoyan, China / France, 2014, DCP, 94 min, Mandarin, e.s.

11:15

SP

•paars01•

With elegant camera movements in apt black-and-white, cameraman/writer/ director Zhang enchants the viewer: a gripping phantasmagoria of modern slavery, opium pushers and youth gangs in an apocalyptic China, where a poor kid from the countryside goes looking for his mother.

INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

La La La at Rock Bottom [wp] SP

•paars01•

Yamashita Nobuhiro, Japan, 2015, DCP, 103 min, Japanese, e.s.

He is very famous in Japan, the singer in red from Kanjani Eight. Here, Subaru plays a small-scale gangster who’s lost his memory and is helped by a girl who just by chance happens to be the manager of a band. Comedy with music, craziness, melancholy and love.

13:30

Banana Pancakes and the Children of Sticky Rice [wp] BF

•geel•

Daan Veldhuizen, Netherlands, 2015, DCP, 93 min, Lao, e.s.

When backpackers come to a small village in rural Laos, their arrival divides the local population and disrupts the relationship between two childhood friends. A complex East-meets-West story, told in a cinematographic language that is as rich as it is confrontational.

5

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INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

(hoofdredactie), Radboud de Bree, Sanne de Maijer (eindredactie), Joost Broeren, Tara Lewis, Sietse Meijer, Maricke Nieuwdorp, Nicole Santé, Paul van de Graaf (redactie), Martje van Nes, Jodie de Groot, Anne van de Wetering (marketing en communicatie) English section: Nick Cunningham (editor-in-chief ), Mark Baker (copy and production editor), Melanie Goodfellow (editors),Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, Ruben Demasure, Tina Poglajen, Harriet Warman (trainees), Lot Piscaer (online) Programma informatie: Chris Schouten, Melissa van der Schoor Coördinatie A-Z: Saskia Gravelijn (tekst), Erik Diekstra (beeld) Fotografie: Felix Kalkman (coordinatie), Bram Belloni, Bas Czerwinski, Corinne de Korver, Nichon Glerum, Ruud Jonkers, Nadine Maas, Marije van Woerden Vormgeving: Sjoukje van Gool, Pascal Tieman, Gerald Zevenboom Drukker: Veenman+ Acquisitie: Daily Productions Oplage: 10.000 per dag

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