Daily Tiger #8 (English)

DAILY TIGER 44th International Film Festival Rotterdam #8 Thursday 29 January 2015

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Stranded in Canton Nanouk Leopold Vita Brevis Bruce Weiss

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Expert debate: New Guard Remake, Remix, Rip-off Crumbs picked up Transatlantique

ENGLISH EDITION

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Bright future Premieres: Battles

“It’s your world and you are part of it!” Pussy Riot in conversation with IFFR director Rutger Wolfson in the Oude Luxor yesterday.

photo: Ruud Jonkers

Position of Strength As CineMart doors closed yesterday at the end of the 32nd edition, event toppers Marit van den Elshout and Bianca Taal reflected on another year of high-level pitching and an essential programme of industry workshops, meetings and presentations.

By Nick Cunningham

“Most projects were completely fully booked with meetings,” pointed out Van den Elshout. “And what was important was that the projects were at a very good stage in terms of development and financing, and they were solid. Sunday’s preparatory session, when the pitchers could anticipate questions about strategy and other recurring questions, was a very simple thing to arrange, and we got a lot of positive response to that. They could really pitch from a position of strength.”

Pitching together

“Of course, director/producer teams may have met with each other many times but they may not have ever pitched together, so this was a good way to get

into that mode,” added Taal.

Despite IFFR and Sundance dates almost completely overlapping, Van den Elshout and Taal were happy with the calibre of funders, buyers and potential co-producers. “Yes, we were wondering what the effect would be, but actually it didn’t affect us. We had a really good turn-out and received very good feedback from the people coming here to discover the new projects.” They were equally happy with the level of “enthused” Rotterdam Lab fledgling attendees, numbering 60 in total, who were here to learn, observe and pitch, as well the high attendances at all of the industry events, which were very well received.

Exciting work

Of key importance at IFFR 2015 was the presentation of festival and industry programmes with distribution at their core. “IFFR Live and Tiger Release naturally tie in with what we are doing here on the level of co-production and the whole trajectory of the fi lm after it has been premiered, and of course finding an audience,” stressed Taal.

“And it was nice that two of these IFFR Live fi lms were

former CineMart projects (The Sky Above Us and Atlantic.). The programme gives us the opportunity to follow CineMart projects and fi lmmakers much further down the line. So there are exciting times to come after this to puzzle everything together – what we do with IFFR Live, how it combines with Tiger release, and how it will develop in line with the Hubert Bals Fund and CineMart. Hard work, but exciting work.”

Prize-winners

Of the prize-winning projects (see below), Van den Elshout and Taal were enthusiastic, referring to Eurimage Co-Production Development Award winner Tonic Immobility as a “very well written character study, meticulously depicted and finely tuned all the way to a great final climax. A modernist slow burner.” The Arte International prize winner Luxembourg is “a Chernobyl fi lm noir with touches of a western. It has an effective and engaging story and characters, great visuals and a location that thematically matches the genres the fi lm uses. It is a great project by a very talented director and stunning set-up for a very strong and cinematic story.”

Taal lists the elements that she believes will add up to success for Wouter Barendrecht Award-winner Santa y Delfín: “Simple facts: Cuba, homosexuality, censorship, working class and intellectuals, young talented director, real story. Top it with strong dramaturgy and you have the definition of a hit project.”

IFFR LATE NIGHT

Tonight, the last of the IFFR Late Nights features Syllas Tzoumerkas, director of energetic Greek fi lm A Blast, and Sander Burger, whose Ik ben Alice (Alice Cares) world premiered in Limelight.

The last dog quiz that might not be about dogs.

TIGER ALERT

Prepare for your trip to IFFR with the Tiger Alert Pro newsletter with all the latest industry news.

Sign up at www.iffr.com/professionals.

Eurimage Co-Production Development Award (€20,000)

Winner: ARTE International Prize (€7,000)

Winner: Wouter Barendrecht Award (€5,000)

Director: Nathalie Teirlinck Producer: Bart Van Langendonck, Xavier Rombaut, Savage Film

Director: Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy Producer: Anna Katchko, Tandem Production

Director: Carlos Lechuga Producer: Claudia Calviño, Producciones de la 5ta Avenida

Alice leads a routine life as an escort, dodging social contact. Until she is confronted by the emotional emptiness in her life.

A simple policeman confronts the system, his job and his women in a city after a nuclear holocaust.

A love story between a committed revolutionary peasant woman and a homosexual writer with ‘ideological problems’.

Tonic Immobilty

Luxembourg

INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

Santa y Delfín

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Antipode takes sales on Stranded in Canton Antipode Sales & Distribution has picked up world sales on Swedish filmmaker Måns Månsson’s documentary drama Stranded in Canton, which screens in IFFR’s Spectrum section.

“We looked at the film thanks to the mediation of the industry department of IFFR and took it on at the end of December,” said Antipode president Anton Mazurov.

The hybrid work revolves around a Congolese man who travels to the Chinese city of Guangzhou to buy cheap t-shirts, but gets stuck there after the goods are delayed and his visa expires.

The idea was inspired by the new phenomenon of thousands of African immigrants moving to China to make a new life.

Rather than working from a fixed script, Månsson placed a fictional character in a real-life setting

and watched the drama unfold.

The film will also screen in the Swedish Premiers Section at the Goteborg Film Festival. Månsson was presented with the Mai Zetterling scholarship aimed at a director with high artistic quality who expands the horizons of short or documentary film. MG

Nanouk Leopold

It took Belgian filmmaker Thierry Knauff five years to complete his poetic work Vita Brevis, but it is worth the wait. By Melanie Goodfellow

The black-and-white, 40-minute film captures the natural spectacle of the blooming of millions of mayflies on the Tisza River, flowing through Ukraine, Romania, Hungary and Serbia.

The mesmerizing work takes the spectator into the heart of the phenomenon through the images of a young girl watching the spectacle in wonderment.

The so-called “Tisza blooming”, in which mature mayfly larvae mature into adults, copulate and then die, within a single day, takes place over three or four days every June.

“It’s a kind of encounter with a very rare and fragile beauty. It took years to make but that’s what it takes to keep track of a certain beauty to try to compose a poem,” says the filmmaker.

Knauff and his crew went to the river for three years running before being able to properly capture the phenomenon, after technical problems and then freak floods scuppered the first two trips.

Shot in 4K, using an early RED one camera, Vita Brevis marks Knauff’s first digital work. “I opted for digital because we had to shoot the film at very high speeds to then be able to slow down the images of the insects in flight,” he explains. “There’s no way to do that in 35mm. The largest film stock you can put in a camera is 300 metres, which will give you roughly four minutes, which if we ran it high-speed would be one minute,” he continues “The swarming only lasts four or five hour and maximum you get 12 hours in which you can shoot. If we had used 35mm we’d have only managed three shots a day.”

Commenting on its 40-minute duration, Knauff says: “It neither short nor long … I tried it both ways but 40-minutes … that’s what it takes. I was trying to compose an organic poem, using sound and lighting which are rhythmic elements for me that are allowing

Thierry Knauff

photo: Felix Kalkman

a kind of musical composition. The film is a poem, composed like a piece of music with variations.”

Knauff has been coming to Rotterdam for 28 years, screening his first film Le Sphinx, revolving around the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon to IFFR founder Hubert Bals at the Belgian Royal Cinémathèque, who went on to select the film.

He describes the festival as an “island of resistance” in the film world.

“The premiere marked the culmination of five years of hard work and stress. The people in the audience seemed genuinely touched and moved and their comments seemed truly heartfelt. It was a relief to finally set the work on its way and to see that it touched the audience,” says Knauff.

photo: Felix Kalkman

About a Boy

Bruce Weiss

By Nick Cunningham

When I told Nanouk Leopold she is considered a doyenne of Dutch arthouse cinema, I had to reassure her that this wasn’t a bad thing. “Does it mean that my films are clichéd?” she asked. No. “Good,” she laughed. In essence, Leopold’s films are anything but clichéd. They are intense, uncompromising and pared to the bone, but never clichéd. And contrary to popular belief, they are not all intense female character studies. She bucked that trend with It’s All So True, a study of a Dutch farmer conflicted by his latent homosexuality, which opened the Berlinale Panorama Special in 2013. Now she is back at CineMart with the drama Cobain, told through the eyes of a 15-year-old boy. “I think it really matters that it is about a boy – I really like telling stories about depressed women of 50 years old, but these films are not always so sexy.”

Cobain, written and produced by Leopold’s long-time partner Stienette Bosklopper, is about a kid who feels compelled to act when his dissolute mother becomes pregnant again. He does not want to see the life that he has suffered to date – one of loneliness and abandonment – repeated in a sibling. “He has to rescue this unborn person, which is how he must rescue himself,” comments the director.

Producers generally underline the sense of creative collaboration that co-production delivers. How does

Life in a Day

Leopold assess co-pro? “It is very important to see how people react, and also to test them,” she answers.

“I made this book of mood boards with my art director, Elsje de Bruin; art photographs, images to talk about just to have a feeling of scenes and characters and environments. I want to see the people’s reactions in the meetings, and their energy. Do people like the story? Yes they do, there is an enormous amount of people who have come to see us. We are overbooked completely and we have to say ‘sorry, no’ [to more meetings]. This is really a new situation for me.”

One of the images in the mood book that Nanouk is mesmerized by, and one that she intuitively feels must form a part of the film, is of a boy walking through the woods carrying a tree, his face hidden. “This image explodes in my mind,” she says. “I think the only thing I really have is intuition. Everybody has it of course, but I have mine and they have their own – that’s what makes a person interesting. We can all tell stories, and there are so many stories that you can tell, but it’s what you do with it that matters. If I can come close to capturing the intuition that I feel then that’s what really makes me happy. And then I cannot fail, because there is no failing in successfully capturing your intuition. A young guy with a small tree, and you can’t see his face. Intuition is what it is really about.

That’s why I make films.”

photo: Corinne de Korver

Building Bridges

By Nick Cunningham

US producer and confirmed Dutchaphile Bruce Weiss is at IFFR to forge stronger links between the US and Netherlands film industries, he told the Daily Tiger.

“Basically it is an initiative to create opportunities for Dutch filmmakers in America, and to create opportunities for American filmmakers in Holland,” he said.

“To have educational exchange programmes between the film academy here, NYU, Colombia, the American Film Institute and various other film schools, and also to have cultural exchange, including programs for children.”

Weiss is also looking to find festival partners to provide reciprocal Dutch and US programmes/focuses within the respective countries. “We are looking to bring in festival partners such as Woodstock and Tribeca. They love the idea, and hopefully we can find a venue in Holland where we can showcase some of their films, or maybe some Sundance films. It’s really about cultural exchange and creating dialogue and opportunities.”

For the past eighteen months, Weiss has been working closely with the Netherlands Consulate in New York and the Department of Dutch Culture USA, who were instrumental in helping him promote and find US distribution for George Sluizer’s Dark Blood, Myriam Kruishoop’s Greencard Warriors and Dirk Jan Roele-

INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

ven’s cycling doc Nieuwe Helden. Now Weiss is looking to gather Dutch stakeholders, in the form of national film bodies, corporations, educational institutions and potential airline and hotel partners to solidify wider US/Dutch collaboration.

“We are trying to raise money to make this a reality, and we are putting together an advisory board of Dutch and American talent, actors and directors interested in this issue,” he claimed. “It’s still at the concept and exploratory stage. Obviously we are talking to all the major institutions, but we hope to get everybody on board and make a more official announcement by April 2015.”

“I just came from the panel on co-producing beyond Europe, but to all intents and purposes beyond Europe did not include America. I have had this discussion for years. A lot of European producers don’t really understand how things work in America and a lot of American producers have no idea how things work in Europe. But I have seen it from both sides, and I want to make the bridge.”

After the murder of Theo van Gogh Weiss in 2014, Weiss produced their English-language remakes of his films 06, Blind Date and Interview, by John Turturro, Stanley Tucci and Steve Buscemi respectively.

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Safeguarding future diversity Expert debate: The New Guard: Artistic Directors and Programmers

By Ruben Demasure

Last Monday, the Film Office organized the packed expert debate ‘The new guard: artistic directors and programmers’. Last year they organized a panel with what was jokingly referred to as the “old guard”: well-established festival directors, such as Marco Mueller and Hans Hurch. This edition, they invited nine programmers to represent the nouvelle vague of programming and explore curatorial innovations.

The participants were Eva Sangiorgi (Ficunam,

Rip it off and start again

Mexico), Elad Samorzik (Jerusalem IFF), Paolo Moretti (La Roche sur Yon FF/ Visons du Réel), Cintia Gil (DocLisboa), Thure Munkholm (CPH:PIX), Michelle Carey (Melbourne FF), Kate Taylor (BFI London FF), John Canciani (Winterhur FF) and Inge de Leeuw (IFFR). This expert debate was moderated

by Madeleine Molyneaux, herself a programmer of the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal.

A first challenge the panelists all shared was how to continue to engage with their audiences. They discus-

sed the difference between local and international festival audiences, the function of festival strands and looking for partnerships to reach a younger audience. Gil shuddered at the thought of not showing a fi lm because of “the audience.” She contends that the programmer’s job is to create an audience for a fi lm by building a context for it. Although an empty room isn’t good for the programmer or respectful to the fi lmmaker, Gil also pointed out that it’s not the role of a festival to pursue full sessions every time.

Canciani assured that audiences will come if they trust your curatorial handwriting.

Another round of the table dealt with how to collaborate and compete for the same fi lms at the same time.

Munkholm rejects a premiere policy for a festival like CPH:PIX. Gil represents the standpoint that premieres are not necessarily bad – they bring new things, but world and international premieres should not be a dogma. De Leeuw nuanced that sales agents just go where they can sell. Afterwards, the lively audience engaged in a Q&A on the limited exposure to African fi lms, the festival circuit’s obsession with nationality and the programming of mid-length fi lms. A future diversity of strongly curated programmes seems guaranteed with this new guard.

Our World In Conversation with Pussy Riot

By Tina Poglajen

photo: Bram Belloni

German-Turkish fi lmmaker Cem Kaya’s entertaining Remake, Remix, Rip-Off explores Turkey’s flourishing remake scene of the 1960s and 70s, and touches on how its legacy can be found in the country’s globally popular soap operas today. The work, which was number seven in the audience poll as of Wednesday, splices together interviews with protagonists of the so-called ‘Yesilçam’ scene and extracts of Turkish remakes of fi lms as diverse as The Wizard of Oz, The Exorcist, Rambo and Star Wars.

“There were lax copyright laws in Turkey back then.

If the Americans didn’t register their fi lms, the works were considered as being in the public domain. This allowed the local fi lm industry to use soundtracks, scripts and even extracts of the fi lm with impunity, which they did,” explains Kaya.

He cites the example of Çetin İnanç’s The Man Who Saved the World, known as the ‘Turkish Star Wars’, in which actors play out key scenes against a back projection of the original fi lm, which the fi lmmaker had cheekily purloined from a Turkish theatre. The same fi lm also makes reference to Raiders of the Lost Ark and Battlestar Galactica.

“He had no money, so he shot the fi lm over the course of one week and instead of paying for special effects took all the Starship Trooper and spaceship battle scenes from the original version of Star Wars,” explains Kaya. “He went into a cinema, where it was screening, overnight, took the print, cut out the scenes he needed and then brought it back in the morning – so it was shown without the scenes in the cinema.”

“It’s so cheesy, but it’s so well-crafted on another level,” says Kaya. “Çetin İnanç without really realising it or knowing it, did the art of collage, it’s beyond imaginative. In his version of Rambo, a bunch of zombies suddenly make an appearance and nobody knows why they are there and then there is a motorbike gang which does karate – it’s so hilariously different.”

Kaya’s own love of the genre stems from the fact that his stepfather ran a video store. “The diaspora in Germany was the biggest market for this so-called ‘Yesilcam cinema’. My stepfather ran a video store and I would watch two of these fi lms a day,” says Kaya, who wrote a thesis about the scene while a student at the Merz Akademie in 2005 and then decided he wanted make a fi lm on the subject.

“It took me another three years to find a producer and seven years to source the fi lms,” says Kaya, who eventually secured the support of UFA Fiction and ZDF’s Das Kleine Fernsehpiel. He is now developing a fi lm about people watching television.

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When asked about feminism in relation to this year’s IFFR programme section What the F!? (featuring the documentary Pussy Versus Putin by the Gogol’s Wives collective), members of Russian activist band Pussy Riot – Nadya, Masha and Petya – were unimpressed by the prevalence of feminism as an issue in the West. “It’s taken for granted here. Everybody knows women are equal to men. If you care about this stuff, you should go to Russia and do some lectures there,” proclaimed the band onstage at the Oude Luxor theatre yesterday. At the conversation, moderated by IFFR’s artistic director Rutger Wolfson, the members of the group talked propaganda, the influence of the state on culture and the arts, the responsibility they feel as artists towards their audience and the simplicity of the portrayals of the current crisis in Russia by the Western media.

“In Russia, things are more complicated than you see on your TV,” they cautioned. “The first question that we get anywhere we go is, ‘What do you think about your president, hey!?’” they mocked, disagreeing with the view of Russia as unified, monolithic and Putinist.

“People are not that influenced by propaganda. They don’t wish to be a part of the country that is seen as aggressive. It’s a very divided country with a lot of

Nadya, Petya and Masha in the Oude Luxor yesterday.

internal conflicts, too complex to be represented by the media. So we hope what we do brings some of that to foreign audiences.”

Showing a clip from the making-of video for their documentary in production, Pussy versus Putin 2, in which the members of the group are seen rehearsing their ‘Punk prayer’ (singing “Virgin Mary, drive Putin away”), Wolfson asked them about the role of fi lm as a medium in the work of a feminist punk rock protest group. “We

photo: Bas Czerwinski

believe that video is important as music. They work together.” Towards what? At the very least, they hope to convince people to stop trying to stay apolitical. “As an artist too, you should think about the influence of your art. Everything’s political, so you can’t be neutral.” And it’s not just about the problems at home, either. “It’s important to be active about things happening elsewhere. It’s your world and you’re a part of it”, Petya, also acting as the band’s interpreter, summed up.

New Europe Film Sales picks up Crumbs Jan Naszewski’s Warsaw-based sales outlet New Europe Film Sales has picked up Miguel Llansó’s Spanish-Ethiopian post-apocalyptic sci-fi fi lm Crumbs. Produced by the Spanish-Ethiopian team of Sergio Uguet de Resayre, Meseret Argaw, Daniel Taye Workou and Miguel Llansó, the fi lm world premiered in Bright Future and will have its market premiere at EFM in Berlin.

Crumbs is the story of Candy, a strange-looking scrap collector, who embarks on a surreal epic journey through the post-apocalyptic Ethiopian landscape.

Crumbs is Llansó’s debut feature.

“Crumbs is a wonderfully weird fi lm and we are sure it will become a cult classic among the sci-fi fans,” said Naszewski. “Miguel Llansó has a very distinc-

tive voice and we want to nurture it. We have been observing him since we saw his short, Chigger Ale, in Locarno in 2013.”

Executive producer, Sergio Uguet de Resayre added: “We look forward to a long-lasting relationship with New Europe Film Sales and feel it will be the right home for Crumbs.”

Immersive Journey Canadian filmmaker Félix Dufour-Laperrière spent a month on a transatlantic cargo ship with his two brothers, a photographer and composer, for the making of his haunting, black-and-white work Transatlantique ( Transatlantic). By Melanie Goodfellow

“It was a very immersive experience. That was the main desire behind it,” explains Dufour-Laperrière. “I’m not a documentary-maker: I come from an animation and/or experimental fi lm background. I approached the project with the tools that I have – which are not documentary tools, but rather animation tools.”

“I had a thematic space which I tried to establish before departure, although it was difficult because we didn’t even know which ship we were boarding,” he explains.

The brothers secured a passage on a cargo ship, chartered by the Montreal-based company FedNav, with the help of a family friend with shipping contacts.

“The other companies we got in contact with didn’t even open the dossier,” says Dufour-Laperrière. “They didn’t want cameras on their ships. We were able to convince FedNav to let us on because our project wasn’t a journalistic one, but rather a project based on living an experience and capturing it on camera.”

The brothers found themselves on a ship, travelling from the Belgian port of Antwerp to Montreal via Tallinn in Estonia. It was transporting a cargo of highly inflammatory fertiliser, manned by a crew of

mainly Indian sailors.

“It was a huge boat, some 250 metres long. It was overwhelming. I think one of the chances we had was that the entire crew was Indian and Hindi. They were very moderate and gentle. It allowed us to integrate relatively easy.”

“The life of these sailors is pretty tough, but the pay is good by the standards of back home. They spend eight or nine months at sea … one described it to me as a bit like a living in a floating prison,” says Dufour-Laperrière.

The resulting, dialogue-less, fi lm captures the ship’s passage through shots of the men at work, or relaxing with board games in the staff room or with a cricket match in ship’s enormous hold, the low throb of the engine ever present in the background.

There is no explanation as a ship passes through stormy waters. The menace of the situation is conveyed by the pounding of the rain, the vessel’s creaking and a repetitive boom as the prow pounds the waves.

“We did a lot of interviews but we didn’t use them.

We wanted to capture the reality of the boat, but at the same time cloak it in an air of mystery as well as explore the idea of these vessels sitting in these ever-changing immense seas.”

The fi lmmaker’s next project will be the pen-andink feature animation Ville Neuve, set against the backdrop of the Quebec referendum of 2005 and revolving around a recovering alcoholic.

INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

photo: Bram Belloni

Fog of war How do people deal with the traces of military conflict? In often absurd ways, Belgian filmmaker Isabelle Tollenaere finds out. Her feature debut, Battles, premiering in Bright Future, explores this through four different cases.

By Ruben Demasure

The film looks at how World War I munitions and inflatable artillery are ‘blown up’ in very different ways in Belgium and Russia. How a bunker becomes a cowshed in Albania and a prison camp turns into a tourist attraction in Latvia.

These places are visited in four chapters, called ‘bomb’, ‘soldier’, ‘bunker’ and ‘tank’. More than simply filling in background information on each segment, Tollenaere aimed to single out these elements, isolating them from the broader context to make these almost microscopic stories all the more universal. “Together, the chapters’ war items form a sort of ghost army”, Tollenaere likes to think.

The film’s main weapon is its very individual way of looking. Tollenaere traces the abnormal that sneaks into the everyday. In scenes of leisure and meals, it becomes apparent that the extraordinary often infiltrates the ordinary. The humorous exploration of the border between the two is well supported by Tollenaere’s distanced, long-take style. “By holding a shot just a little bit longer, it gets a staged quality, while it’s a very direct and honest way of observation at the same time”, she notes.

Rather than the impact of these remnants of war on the environment, Battles targets the human or social landscape. “Although it’s not a film that focuses on the people and their stories, it’s about their inventive ways of dealing with military traces,” she notes. A conflict isn’t just

This look into the future fits the film’s merging of past and present.

While images such as re-enactments create temporal ambiguity, the recurrent imagery of nature is an indicator of time as well. Tollenaere sees the wind, trees and clouds as invariable “silent witnesses” amidst the continuous change and evolution. A wisp of smoke comes past in all segments. Battles never just go up in smoke, however.

over, but keeps resonating in all kind of ways. The segments show different manifestations of negotiations with these traces: elimination or re-enactment, or transformation of their function for practical and ‘educational’ or tourist purposes. Tollenaere aims to let the film’s meaning arise from the combinations of and parallels between all these aspects. The Russian case shows how objects can re-activate and mobilize a memory in the service of contemporary patriotism and militarization. “On that account, it’s surreal to see what happened in Ukraine with the revolution and the annexation by Russia a few months after we filmed there. We couldn’t foresee that.”

Battles Bright Future Premieres Thu 29 Jan 11:30 CI5; Sat 31 Jan 22:00 LV5

PRESS & INDUSTRY SCREENINGS 09.00 de Doelen Jurriaanse Zaal

10.00

11.00

SP The End of an Age

12.00

Bruno Safadi/ Ricardo Pretti 09:15 – 10:28

BF La creazione

Cinerama 3

Cinerama 4

BF A Matter of

Lee Kwang-Kuk 15:15 – 16:54

BF The Man in the Wall

WF No Men Beyond

This Point

Matthew Yeager 14:00 – 15:18

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15:15

A Matter of Interpretation [ip]

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Olaf de Fleur Johannesson, Iceland, 2015, DCP, 96 min, Icelandic/Serbian/English, e.s.

A crime sequel from Iceland, which also works without its predecessor (City State). Unambitious detective wants to kill two birds with one stone: unmask his corrupt boss and dismantle a drugs organisation. Atmospheric, cleverly written, well acted and surprising right up to the end.

Parabellum [wp]

BF

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Can a film be clinical and informative and yet also dreamy and mysterious?

Of course, and a lot more besides. That much is apparent from the beautiful Battles, an observational essay that investigates the traces recent conflicts have left in the landscape and the people at four different sites in Europe.

de Doelen Willem Burger Zaal 10:15

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Carlos M. Quintela, Argentina/ Cuba/Switzerland/Germany, 2015, DCP, 100 min, Spanish, e.s.

Ismail Basbeth, Indonesia, 2015, DCP, 80 min, no dialogue

A dreamy, absurdist fantasy film based on Indonesian legends. Asa is the daughter of a seer. To escape her mother’s clutches, she lives hidden in a forest. One day, she is collected by a dog, who turns out to be a man sent by her mother. Sophisticated visions.

Cinerama 2 09:15

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Roberto Anjari-Rossi, Germany/Chile, 2015, DCP, 83 min, Spanish, e.s.

Grandparents can be much closer to grandchildren than their mothers or fathers. This is true of one family living in a small village in Chile. There are just two of them - aging grandmother and her young granddaughter. It’s impossible to take our eyes off them. Debut of unique tenderness and pure magic.

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Drifting effortlessly between raw psychological realism and dreamy surrealism and loaded with unique Cuban archive footage, this film portrays three generati-

09:45

La creazione di significato BF

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Simone Rapisarda Casanova, Canada/ Italy, 2014, Video, 90 min, Italian, e.s.

Award-winning debut follows the shepherd Pacifico, born soon after World War II, when so many victims fell in the beautiful landscape of the Apuan Alps. Somewhere between the old and the new Europe. And somewhere between drama, dream and anthropology, looking for the notion of ‘creating meaning’.

Sonia Herman Dolz, Netherlands, 2015, DCP, 75 min, Dutch, e.s.

Solos [wp]

Je suis le peuple

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Film showing how Sjarel Ex ‘directs’ the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum. A director must have many faces, as you have to deal with wondrous artists, ancient collectors, business people, fellow directors, staff and many others. Multi-talent Ex seems to have no problem with this at all.

12:00

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Bernard Bellefroid, Belgium, 2014, DCP, 90 min, French/English

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Sharon Maymon/Tal Granit, Germany/ Israel, 2014, DCP, 90 min, Hebrew

Tussen 10 en 12

14:00

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Peter Hoogendoorn, Netherlands/ France/Belgium, 2014, DCP, 70 min, Dutch, e.s.

You’re at home with your girlfriend. A knock at the door: the police, terrible news. Within a few seconds, your life is turned upside down. Then you have to tell your parents. The contrast between the seriousness of this task and the banality of the everyday leads to painful, absurd and at times even comical moments.

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Alice Rohrwacher, Italy/Switzerland/ Germany, 2014, DCP, 111 min, Italian/French/German

Dreamy second film by Italian director Alice Rohrwacher about a family of beekeepers in the remote Tuscany countryside, living by their own rules.

But the outside world can’t be kept at arm’s length forever. Young Gelsomina is almost an adult, and realises her father is not the man she thought he was.

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No Men Beyond This Point [wp]

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•blauw•

Mark Sawers, Canada, 2015, DCP, 80 min, English

Just imagine: since 1953, women have been able to reproduce without interference from male genes. Men are no longer being born and are an endangered species. This deadpan mockumentary follows the youngest man still alive Andrew Myers (37) - in a world in which women wear the trousers.

Calling [ip]

BF

•geel•

Father and son on a journey in the forest. Their trip through nature is an act of initiation for them both. What looks innocent and safe turns out to be dangerous and vicious. A beautifully shot meditation on first encounters with the world as it is.

20:45

Transatlantique [ip]

Cinerama 4

BF

•geel•

Félix Dufour-Laperrière, Canada, 2014, DCP, 72 min, English

BF

•geel•

Miguel Llansó, Spain/Ethiopia/Finland, 2015, DCP, 68 min, Amharic, e.s.

A post-apocalyptic, Surrealist sciencefiction romance from Ethiopia is not something you come across every day.

The Spaniard Llansó who lives in Addis Ababa embroiders on his fascinating short film Chigger Ale and again finds Daniel Tadesse willing to play the lead.

Georg Tiller, Austria, 2015, DCP, 70 min, Cantonese, e.s.

Ben is the typical Brooklyn hipster with his band, job and girlfriend. But is that all there is? Without any real reason or big drama, he goes off in a completely different direction. Ben switches from protagonist into passer-by, about whom his vague acquaintances only occasionally think. A striking portrait of this individualistic generation.

Marcin Dudziak, Poland/France, 2014, DCP, 75 min, Polish, e.s.

Fettah’s desire for freedom in Europe is greater than his love for his homeland and family. The young fisherman sets off on an exhausting, perilous journey across the terrain he knows best: the ocean.

And not by boat, but on his surfboard.

Breathtaking, poetic and exciting.

White Coal [wp]

•geel•

18:45

LL

Jan-Willem van Ewijk, Netherlands/ Belgium/Germany/Morocco, 2014, DCP, 89 min, Arabic/French

Crumbs [wp]

BF

16:30

19:45

Atlantic. [ep]

Valedictorian [wp] Matthew Yeager, USA, 2015, DCP, 78 min, English

Documentary essay about life aboard a transatlantic freighter. A microcosm, in poetic black-and-white and with an allaying soundtrack, that not only reveals the vulnerability of people in the face of technology and nature, but also shows the everyday nature of this life, in which there is space on the open seas for an improvised game of cricket.

22:30

Erdos Rider [wp]

11:30 •blauw•

An older married couple in an old people’s home in Jerusalem see friends and acquaintances suffering unnecessarily in the last days of their lives. They decide to take action. A pitch-black comedy on friendship and farewells, which took the audience award in Venice.

INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

Wang Haolin 22:30 – 23:56

09:15

14:30

The Farewell Party

BF Erdos Rider

Félix DufourLaperrière 20:45 – 21:57

•geel•

Two women: one a rich, single businesswoman aged 48, the other a homeless hairdresser with a dream. These two very different lives are brought together by a pregnancy. Poignant, empathetic and strongly acted drama that asks questions about motherhood and childhood. Who takes care of who? And what makes a good mother?

BF

BF Transatlantique

22:30

BF

Revolution, demonstrations, elections in Egypt: we saw the crowds on Tahrir Square. But what happened in the countryside? This documentary follows the inhabitants of a village in southern Egypt. Their views on politics, hope for the future and final disappointment. Because in everyday life, very little changes.

Melody

Jan-Willem van Ewijk 22:30 – 23:59

Le meraviglie

Anna Roussillon, France, 2014, DCP, 111 min, Arabic, e.s.

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.

Conducting Boijmans [wp]

22:15

09:15

14:30

16:30

Maybe the 1960s, maybe the future.

Seven astronauts wake up in a spaceship, not knowing where they have come from nor where they are heading. As the ship operates by itself, they have ample time to meditate, rather scientifically, on matter, life and the universe.

Cinerama 3

A fascinating documentary, shot in the mountainous north of Burma. No filmmaker is welcome there, because, against the background of a civil war, the jade miners enter the deserted mines illegally. With the aid of filming locals, however, Midi Z was able to compile this portrait. Getting rich quick turns out to be hard and risky work

The Man in the Wall [wp]

•geel•

Four young people travel with a mobile cinema and flopped art-house film to remote villages in the jungles of Peru. Charming reflection on cinema, life, friendship and loneliness; beautifully shot by the brilliant Chilean Inti Briones. The world premiere of the second film by the maker of the successful Casadentro (2012).

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

Pathé 5

An old woman (a wonderful Gita Nørby) in the autumn of her life falls in love with a man who is not her husband.

This time, the director of realistic dramas about the seamy side of Danish society (R., Northwest) doesn’t show any violence or wrongs, but maintains his gripping and honest gaze. Nominated for The Big Screen Award.

La obra del siglo [wp]

TG

LL Atlantic.

16:45

BF

Joanna Lombardi, Peru, 2015, DCP, 92 min, Spanish, e.s.

Midi Z, Taiwan/Myanmar, 2015, DCP, 104 min, Burmese, e.s.

19:30

LL Le meraviglie

Marcin Dudziak 18:45 – 20:00

Philippe Fernandez, France, 2015, DCP, 105 min, French, e.s.

•geel•

After a period of rehab, the daughter of a politician in Recife has to reintegrate into society and adapt her behaviour to the wishes of her ambitious father.

Propelled by a fantastic leading role from Bianca Joy Porte, Aragão’s dynamic second film combines a retro-cool mood with contemporary anger. Nominated for The Big Screen Award

Threatened by the end of the world, a group of Buenos Aires residents receive lessons in survival at a resort in the marshy Tigre delta. The Austrian background of Rinner, who trained in Argentina, shines through in this bitterly 11:45 comical stylisation of human failings Jade Miners [wp] when face-to-face with the apocalypse.

Another Trip to the Moon [wp]

Cosmodrama [wp]

Daniel Aragão, Brazil, 2014, DCP, 90 min, Portuguese, e.s.

El legado [wp]

Joanna Lombardi 22:15 – 23:47

BF Calling

19:30

•paars01•

Michael Noer, Denmark, 2015, DCP, 90 min, Danish, e.s.

12:30

TG

Lukas Valenta Rinner, Argentina/ Austria/Uruguay, 2015, DCP, 75 min, Spanish, e.s.

Isabelle Tollenaere, Belgium/ Netherlands, 2015, DCP, 90 min, Russian/Latvian/English/Dutch, e.s.

Key House Mirror [ip]

•geel•

In his playful and humorous second film, Lee demonstrates his narrative talent, if only by not getting lost when he allows his characters (including pushy detectives and unemployed actors) to interpret each other’s dreams.

Once again, we can describe the former assistant to Hong Sang-soo as his sorcerer’s apprentice. Nominated for The Big Screen Award.

17:30

14:00

Battles [wp]

BF

Lee Kwang-Kuk, South Korea, 2014, DCP, 99 min, Korean, e.s.

SP

24.00

BF Solos

Philippe Fernandez 19:30 – 21:15 Alice Rohrwacher 19:45 – 21:36

Mark Sawers 16:30 – 17:50

12:45

I Swear I’ll Leave This Town [ip]

BF Cosmodrama

Peter Hoogendoorn 16:45 – 17:55

DONDERDAG 29-01-2015

Brave Men’s Blood [ip]

23.00

Ismail Basbeth 19:30 – 20:50

en 12

BF Valedictorian

ons of Cubans. In their apartment in the workers’ quarters at a half-built nuclear power station, they are forced to simply carry on. A fresh voice from, and about, a country in a stalemate.

11:30

22.00

to the Moon

Conducting Boijmans

Sharon Maymon/ Tal Granit 14:30 – 16:00

Georg Tiller 11:30 – 12:40

A joy for the eyes and ears, this highpoint of the Brazilian trilogy Operation Sonia Silk. A dreamy making-of about the two other episodes and also a cinematographic essay (in picture, text, sound and music) about cinema and filmmaking and, above all, about love.

21.00

TG Another Trip

Lukas Valenta Rinner 17:30 – 18:45

LL Tussen 10

Party

BF White Coal

SP

20.00

Sonia Herman Dolz 16:30 – 17:45

LL The Farewell

Bernard Bellefroid 12:00 – 13:30

Miguel Llansó 09:15 – 10:23

+

Evgeny Ruman 14:30 – 16:02

LL Melody

Anna Roussillon 09:15 – 11:06

Bruno Safadi/Ricardo Pretti, Brazil, 2014, DCP, 73 min, Portuguese, e.s.

TG Parabellum

Interpretation

Midi Z 11:45 – 13:29

BF Je suis le peuple

The End of an Age [ip]

19.00

Daniel Aragão 12:45 – 14:15

SP Jade Miners

Roberto Anjari-Rossi 09:15 – 10:38

09:15

18.00

This Town

BF El legado

de Doelen Jurriaanse Zaal

17.00

BF I Swear I’ll Leave

di significato

BF Crumbs

16.00

Isabelle Tollenaere 14:00 – 15:30

Carlos M. Quintela 12:30 – 14:10

Simone Rapisarda Casanova 09:45 – 11:15

Cinerama 2

15.00

TG La obra del siglo

Michael Noer 10:15 – 11:45

Pathé 5

14.00 BF Battles

Olaf de Fleur Johannesson 11:30 – 13:03

SP Key House Mirror

de Doelen Willem Burger Zaal

13.00

SP Brave Men’s Blood

BF

•geel•

An industrial film on two kinds of labour: socialist and capitalist. A poetic investigation of human relations with the soil and the Earth. A striking journey from Poland to Taiwan that makes us think, contemplate and dream.

Pure film.

BF

•geel•

Wang Haolin, China, 2014, DCP, 86 min, Mongolian/Mandarin, e.s.

Three stories and about love, fate, misunderstanding, desire and birthplace linked together by ingenious details.

From the plains of in Mongolia to a hotel room in Beijing and back. A beautiful fiction debut by the maker of the award-winning The Land.

5

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INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

Anton Damen (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 (editor),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 (coördinatie), 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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