DAILY TIGER 44th International Film Festival Rotterdam #9 Friday 30 January 2015
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photo: Bram Belloni
Limelight: Between 10 and 12
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photo: Ruud Jonkers
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photo: Nichon Glerum
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photo: Bram Belloni
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Spectrum Premieres: Stinking Heaven
photo: Ramon Mangold
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photo: Bram Belloni
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New Europe Mar pick-up 12 Months in 1 Day
ENGLISH EDITION
6.
Six degrees of IFFR curation: 1. With director Michael Imperioli at the premiere of 2009’s opening film The Hungry Ghosts 2. Presenting Japanese art cinema maestro Yoshida Kiju with a book celebrating the director’s life and work, in 2010 3. With IFFR interim managing director Stef Fleischeuer, Artist in Focus Cameron Jamie and Dale Crover of The Melvins at the CineMart Industry Party in 2008) 4. With Hivos Tiger Awards winners Huang Ji (Egg and Stone), Dominga Sotomayor (De jueves a domingo) and Maja Miloš (Clip) in 2012 5. With legendary Japanese filmmaker and IFFR regular Miike Takashi in 2012 6. Welcoming the world to Rotterdam: the opening speech of IFFR 2012
The Art of Letting Go As the 44th International Film Festival Rotterdam draws to an end, outgoing festival director Rutger Wolfson talks to the Daily Tiger about how his final edition has panned out. By Melanie Goodfellow
Sitting in IFFR’s busy Karel Doormanstraat headquarters the morning after the CineMart closing party, Rutger Wolfson looks tired but happy as he sips a strong cup of PG Tips tea. “I’m really happy. It’s gone really smoothly. We launched some interesting industry initiatives, IFFR Live and the Tiger Releases, and also had some exciting moments connected to Pussy Riot, as well as La La La at Rock Bottom,” he says, referring to Japanese Yamashita Nobuhiro’s musical comedy starring pop star Shibutani Subaru. A performance by Subaru during the festival caused something of a social media storm in Japan after a picture of the event was posted on Facebook and tweeted by IFFR staff. “We suddenly had 750 new followers. It was really crazy. It’s stuff like this, the unexpected things that happen during a festival, which make it really fun,” says Wolfson. Highlights
Other highlights for the festival director have included a retrospective devoted to experimental fi lmmaker and projectionist Bruce McClure as well as the Signals programmes devoted to propaganda, feminism and the increasing encroachment of digital technology on everyday life and personal time.
“I’m a huge fan of Bruce McClure’s work. My private tastes are very much connected to my background in contemporary art,” says Wolfson, who served as a curator at art centre Witte de With before heading up the road to the festival. Public Space
Juggling the different interests of festival audiences and stakeholders, says Wolfson, has been one of the trickiest, but also one of the most satisfying, aspects of overseeing the programme. “One of the nicest things about the festival is that you deal with several groups of people who all have a sense of ownership,” says Wolfson. “I see the festival very much as a public space where we can reflect on certain developments in society that are not really addressed in depth elsewhere. We did this with several of the Signals programmes this year … looking at subjects such as propaganda and feminism … and I got a sense they really clicked with audiences.” Distribution drive
Perhaps the most exciting new developments at this year’s festival, from an industry point of view, were the IFFR Live and Tiger Releases initiatives, aimed at supporting the distribution of the fi lms shown at the festival. Wolfson says both events were well received. “There is a strange paradox, that festivals are increasingly successful and people come to see fi lms in huge numbers, but afterwards these works disappear,” he says. “We wanted to capture some of that excitement.”
The IFFR Live events, simultaneously screening fi lms at the festival and 40 theatres in 10 countries across Europe as well as digitally, went down particularly well. “We received pictures of a theatre in Poland decked out with Tigers and audiences in Belgrade holding up little home-made tiger masks in front of their faces. At some points, we were even trending on twitter,” says Wolfson. Something different
Wolfson’s tenure at the festival has not all been plain sailing. He has sometimes been on the receiving end of criticism suggesting that IFFR’s penchant for avant-garde, artistic fi lms is out of sync with audiences and the fi lm industry. “Many of the underlying assumptions of these criticisms are wrong,” says Wolfson. “There is still large interest in the industry and a large audience for the fi lms we focus on here, and I think the fact we have such a strong profi le is in our favour in the long run. So many festivals chase the more high-profi le fi lms and stars and I think we’re in a strong position because people recognise Rotterdam as something different.”
He cites the example of Jayro Bustamente’s Ixcanul, which completed post-production with the support of the Hubert Bals Fund and is now premiering in competition in Berlin. “They came to us saying we have an invitation for competition in Berlin, what shall we do? We could have staked a claim, but we were like, ‘that’s great for you guys, go for it’ … at the end of the day it’s about putting the fi lmmakers first.” Top three titles
Looking back at eight long years at IFFR, Wolfson reflects on his top three festival titles from his period at the helm. “They are Sergio Caballero’s Finisterrae, David Manuli’s The Legend of Kaspar Hauser, starring Vincent Gallo, and Veiko Õunpuu’s The Temptation of St. Tony,” he says. “The third and the first were in competition and probably strangely enough they are quite comparable on some levels. All three stayed with me and I still think about these fi lms almost on a daily basis.”
Filmmakers first
Other critics have also questioned why fi lms that benefit from the support of CineMart or the Hubert Bals Fund end up premiering at bigger profi le festivals. “You need to look at the full picture and how we fit into the fi lm industry,” says Wolfson. “We tend to go with what’s best for the fi lmmaker and not the ego of the festival,” he says.
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Geen 18, geen alcohol.
New Europe Film Sales pick up Mar Jan Naszewski’s Warsaw-based sales outlet New Europe Film Sales has picked up Dominga Sotomayor’s Berlinale Forum-bound Mar. Produced by Dominga Sotomayor’s Cinestacion and Ivan Eibuszyc’s Frutacine, the film is a Chilean-Argentinian coproduction. Mar is the story of Martin, whose beach vacation with his girlfriend is spoiled by the arrival of his mother. IFFR alumnus Sotomayor’s previous feature film
De Jueves a Domingo (Thursday Till Sunday) won a Tiger Award for best feature at IFFR 2012, as well as best film awards at Indie Lisboa, New Horizons and Valdivia Film Festival. Jan Naszewski and New Europe also worked with Sotomayor as a co-producer and sales agent on her short film La Isla (co-directed with Katarzyna Klimkiewicz), which won a Tiger Award for Short Film at Rotterdam IFFR in 2013. NC
Rule number one By Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Twelve into One By Nick Cunningham
Margot Schaap’s Een dag in ‘t jaar (12 Months in 1Day), screening in IFFR’s Limelight section with a Dutch distribution deal already inked with Mokum Film, is a tale told in the telling, says producer Hasse van Nunen. In the film, three New Year’s Eve revelers connected by a recent loss leave a party to go on a long walk that they believe lasts for 24 hours, only to discover that it in fact lasts a year. “It was a strange project for us, as we mainly produce documentaries,” stresses Van Nunen, who runs the production house Een van de jongens (which translates as ‘One of the Boys’). “But Margot is one of my oldest friends and she told me that she wanted to make a film outside of the system, with just ourselves and no money involved [apart from the €7,000 graduation film budget from The Netherlands Film Academy]. For me it was attractive because I felt that same need to make something just for myself, just for the fun of it.” Schaap wanted friends and volunteers, as well as the three lead actors, to set aside one shooting day per month, with filming taking place two hours later each time. “It goes from New Year’s Eve to the [Dutch] Queen’s Birthday [30 April], then to lake swimming in the summer. The fun thing was that we were making up the film as we went along. We knew the
characters and we knew the character who was the bond between them all, but we knew nothing else, as there was no script.” Given the sporadic approach to the material, everybody put a check on their expectations. It was, after all, more about the process than the result. But during the edit a good film began to emerge – one that was ready to show to the world. The film was very well received at the Film Academy graduation show at EYE, where IFFR programmers were in attendance. “We thought, oh wow, this is really something extra,” says Van Nunen.” A month later it was picked up by Mokum Film. Of director Schaap, Van Nunen is fulsome in her praise. “She has her completely own style of filming and of looking at the world. She sees details that other people just don’t see. That is what makes her so interesting. The basic story wasn’t that complete, but she made it come alive in the details, and in the voice-over. She makes you look at the world a little differently than you did before.”
“Rule number one is stay sober” – this is first of several rules governing a group of recovering addicts in Nathan Silver’s fifth feature, the oxymoronic, if literally, titled Stinking Heaven – a disconcerting consideration of communalism. Stinking Heaven, a world premiere in IFFR’s Spectrum section, fields a group of characters who have fled the real world and all of its intoxicating temptations to live together. Unfortunately, the change from permissive freedom to prohibitive stricture proves too much and, humans being humans, interactions become messy. Hell, as Sartre said, is other people. Then there are more rules: “You must take part in all the group activities; if you have any debts, illnesses … looming over you, you must be upfront when you come; be healthy; don’t be too worried about fashion …”, Silver’s heaven is not much different from Sartre’s hell. Fights break out, love affairs go wrong, families become separated, someone uses bleach for non-cleaning purposes, et cetera. It isn’t so much sobriety that is missing, as peace and quiet. All of this is familiar ground to Silver, who has returned time and again to explore the cramped space between people living in close quarters. The question arises: What does he find compelling about communal living? “Our need for people outweighs the difficulty of dealing with others,” says Silver. “I find that, no matter which way you cut it, if you throw more than one person into a room there’s bound to be conflict and chaos. Communal living is an extreme example of people
forced into tight corners and is a good way for me to explore this obsession.” Chaos in Stinking Heaven is provoked by the weak resolve of one resident, whose frailty becomes the undoing of the others. Like in the movies, and in life, when rules are stated so baldly, the implication is someone will somehow break some of them. Set in the 1990s, Silver employs small screen techniques from that time. “We shot on an old broadcast camera as this is an early ’90s period piece.” His film is framed as an ancient documentary, a feature-length episode of a proto-reality television series. The experience for today’s viewer is voyeuristic, but without the titillation – the lives Silver presents, lacking the artificial finesse of network television, are far too messy, too rowdy, to tickle or impart any sensation akin to pleasure. So effective is the lensing that it becomes part of the story. Speaking about the process, the director says, “We shot extremely long takes, as you would when shooting a documentary, and then made sense of the footage in the edit.” So much of the film is approached factually, as if the events were recorded rather than enacted. Yet, Silver is quick to situate his film in the realm of imagination. “Stinking Heaven is a documentary about a fictional world,” he says. ‘Fictional,’ fortunately, has never meant ineffectual. Stinking Heaven Spectrum Premieres Fri 30 Jan 12:00 CI3
Een dag in ‘t jaar / 12 Months in 1 Day Limelight Sat 31 Jan 12:30 PA3
Tragedy in Real Time By Nick Cunningham
In his press notes for his IFFR Limelight selection Tussen 10 en 12 (Between 10 and 12), debutant Peter Hoogendoorn places the process of dealing with the death of a sibling in the abstract. “There are no codes or rules about how to deal with loss. All that is left is to travel through time and space. A journey through a vacuum, stripped of all irrelevancies.” The film, shot in real time, depicts the period immediately after news of a young woman’s death is conveyed, first to her brother and his girlfriend, and then to other family members. Much of the film takes place in a police car as the family members deal with their grief, either in silence or with a sense of incomprehension. “I saw it more as an opportunity to film a state of mind,” Hoogendoorn stresses in interview. “Normally, you can control a lot of things. You know that a car travels from A to B and that everything has a name.
You know what a thing is and how it connects with other things. But what happens in the film is a sort of meditation within an atmosphere of impossibility, where nothing has any meaning anymore, and everything is just sound or movement.” The claustrophobic feeling of Tussen 10 en 12 is intensified by Hoogendoorn’s decision to shoot in long takes. “We didn’t shoot with an over-the-shoulder and then a total shot, like the classical set-up. Every scene is one single shot. We didn’t cut anything, only when a character is moving from one space to another space. And even then, a lot of the time the camera stays within the empty spaces. It is more of a mesmerising atmosphere.” “And also in the car, we didn’t cut,” he continues. “As an audience you are in the same car, along with the family. A lot of people ask who is the main character. My script coach said he thinks the audience is the
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main character. The audience is always there throughout these long takes and you have the experience of being there at that particular moment. So it was always difficult to decide where to put the camera – it was like deciding where you want to put the audience.” The film received its world premiere at Venice Days in September 2014. Venice Days director Giorgio Gosetti commented of director Hoogendoorn: “This is really an author, a true film director, who is able to articulate the certainty of the cinema he wants to make and is able to put the viewer right inside the drama, offering a unique approach and a unique point of view. This is the cinema that I love. I simply could not step away from the film.” Tussen 10 en 12 / Between 10 and 12 Limelight Sat 31 Jan 10:00 LV3
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