DAILY TIGER 44th International Film Festival Rotterdam #10 Saturday 31 January 2015
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Videophilia (and Other Viral Syndromes)
Vanishing Point
photo: Bas Czerwinski
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La obra del siglo (The Project of the Century)
ENGLISH EDITION
The 44th IFFR might be slowly drawing to a close, but with three Hubert Bals Fund-supported films winning Hivos Tiger Awards, the IFFR Live programme spreading the Rotterdam spirit far and wide, a highly profitable 32nd CineMart and new support for the HBF from the Creative Europe-MEDIA programme, we can look back on a hugely successful edition. And of course forward to next year. See you then!
British director Peter Strickland was an English teacher before he fulfi lled his ambition of making fi lms. Interviewing him on The Duke of Burgundy, revolving around the power play between two female lovers in a sadomasochistic relationship, is like sitting in on a seminar by a favourite professor with a specialism in 1960s soft-core porn and erotica. Adult movie makers, erotica directors and cinema movements trip off his tongue as he talks about his latest work, initially born from a discussion with its producer, Andrew Starke of Rook Films, about Spanish Jess Franco’s 1974 Lorna the Exorcist, revolving around a domineering woman who seduces the daughter of an ex-lover. “Rook Films have a DVD label called Mondo Macabre on which they released quite a few Jess Franco fi lms. I didn’t know so much about his work, but the conversation got me looking at that corner of cinema, which is kind of seen as disreputable and often disregarded, and also includes fi lms by Jean Rollins, Radley Metzger, Walerian
Juan Daniel F. Molero
Hivos Tiger Awards, including a cash prize of €15,000 to each of the winners: La obra del siglo (The Project of the Century), Carlos M. Quintela. HBF post-production support 2014; Videophilia (and Other Viral Syndromes), Juan Daniel F. Molero. HBF post-production support 2014; Vanishing Point, Jakrawal Nilthamrong. HBF script and project development support 2009, and post-prod support 2014. CineMart participant in 2011. The Big Screen Award, with an
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Carlos M. Quintela
offer of distribution in the Benelux, plus release support from IFFR valued at €10,000: Second Coming, Debbie Tucker Green. FIPRESCI Award, given to best fi lm world-premiering in Bright Future Battles: Isabelle Tollenaere. NETPAC Award, given to best Asian fi lm: Poet on a Business Trip, Ju Anqi. HBF post-production script and project development 2004. KNF Award, given by the Association of Dutch Film Critics for their choice of best fi lm in the
WINNERS
Jakrawal Nilthamrong
photo: Bram Belloni
By Melanie Goodfellow
Borowczyk, and to some degree Alain Robbe-Grillet and Tinto Brass,” explains Strickland. “I take some of the central motifs from those fi lms, which were mostly about female lovers and sadomasochism, but my fi lm is very different. Many of them were very bad but some were very good – remarkable even. At his worst, Jess Franco was sordid. At his he best, he was like this psychosexual George Franju,” adds Strickland, referring to the late French fi lm director known for his mixture of fantasy and realism. Although inspired by these 1960s and ’70s works in look and leitmotivs, The Duke of Burgundy subverts the genre to go behind the curtains of a sadomasochistic relationship between a submissive maid and her demanding mistress. As the fi lm progresses, it is not exactly clear who wields the power. “The one constant in the films that I looked at was that they were made by male heterosexuals mostly for a male heterosexual audience, so it’s male heterosexual appropriation of lesbian erotica. It ’s strange for me that I am appropriating an appropriation. It’s why it seemed to make sense to have an admission of guilt of the male gaze in the title – The Duke of Burgundy. In a world absent of men, the elephant in the room is the male gaze.”
photo: Felix Kalkman
Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy screens at IFFR in the Limelight section today. The Daily Tiger caught up with the filmmaker ahead of the screening.
And the 2015 IFFR award winners are… photo: Bram Belloni
Of human bondage
Big Screen Award competition: Key House Mirror, Michael Noer. MovieZone Award, chosen by the young people’s MovieZone jury of EYE: The Dark Horse, James Napier Robertson. CineMart participant in 2011. Tonight at the closing night ceremony in de Doelen, the IFFR Audience Award, valued at €10,000 will be given, as will The Dioraphte Audience Award, also valued at €10,000 for one of the Hubert Bals Fund-supported fi lms screening at IFFR.
25 - 29 march 2015 the cinemas willemstad
curacaoiffr.com
La Obra del Siglo WINNER
By Ruben Demasure
On the site of a never-completed power plant in Cuba, a son’s return electrifies the relationship with his workless father and his bitter grandfather. With great chemistry between them, these three generations of Cubans form a bruised bunch, all forced to live together – an existence marked by the absence of women. The real protagonist of La Obra del Siglo (The Project of the Century) however is possibly the place where the story is rooted. Electro-Nuclear City (ENC) is a little-known construction site where the Soviets once planned to build the first nuclear power station on Cuban soil. However, this ‘project of the century’ (hence the English title), was never completed due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Cuban filmmaker Carlos M. Quintela, in competition with his second feature, interlaces the situation of the former construction workers, who have stayed behind in the temporary housing units, with archival footage of the project. With its prominent dome, the plant is almost more reminiscent of the Taj Mahal than a structure that could actually belong in the Cuban environment.
Quintela describes the place as a ghost town. “Because of the abandonment of the project, that place was never really born and never died; it’s a little bit dead and a little bit alive at the same time.” The film draws parallels between the alien place created by this strange endeavor and space travel. The Communist utopia connects to the cosmic utopia. For Quintela, going into space is the ultimate utopia. “Just as is the case with the three alpha-males living together, it’s a matter of machismo, a matter of size. All of the time Cuba is trying to show to the world that it has size, a little island that pretends to do something bigger.” Not without a sense of humor, metaphysical elements provide the story with a sprinkling of stardust. For Quintela, the illogical or unreal events that happen in the film correspond to the strangeness of the place. He describes them as “errors in the system”. A straightforward rendering of the place and its streets would make its failure too obvious. “I’m interested in the human matter”, Quintela notes. A key role is reserved for the grandfather’s goldfish,
Vanishing Point WINNER
By Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
At some point in Jakrawal Nilthamrong’s Vanishing Point, one of two men whose lives are partially depicted narrates a story relayed to him
by a friend. Sometime after border guards and ‘terrorists’ agree to a truce, the friend – himself a border guard – finds himself picking eggplants
Benjamin. It is remarked in the film that these animals only have a memory of fifteen seconds. This would be a great asset for the humans living there. This ghost town, which the involved nations want to forget, remains haunted by the past, as shown in the interwoven colour archival footage. Gorgeously shot in black and white, Quintela considers this contem-
porary place simply impossible to imagine in colour, everything is grey. Surviving in their rectangular container, the inhabitants are like fish out of water.
from the same tree as a ‘terrorist’. They stare at one another then leave. A few days later, they return and exchange ‘porn books’. On one level, this story typifies the possibility of masculine camaraderie stimulated by the bodies of women. It also signifies the similarities between people who on the surface are different. Nilthamrong’s second feature is concerned mostly with the latter notion. But before this theme is pursued, an autobiographical moment opens the film, as photos of an accident involving the director’s parents appear onscreen as though part of a character’s collection of photos. Nilthamrong’s mother survived the crash. His father wasn’t so lucky. Disabled and unable to progress in the military, Nilthamrong says, “his future stopped there.” A sad event, yet some morbid comedy ensues. Laughing, the director recalls that, when he was five, someone put clippings of the crash as reported in the papers in his room. For years, he woke up to the image. A drawing of one of the clippings is used on Vanishing Point’s poster. His mother saw it recently and remarked, “that looks familiar...”. Although rich, that history is tangential to the film.
Vanishing Point relates parallel stories about two men from different generations, both unnamed and apparently dissimilar, but flawed in the same way. The younger man, introduced at a crime scene, is clearly an idealist, his belief in probity so strong that his insistence on due process leads the police to demand he step away. Later, he is seen patronising a prostitute – so this epitome of righteousness is himself far from righteous. The older man is a factory owner. A dour man disconnected from his family, he springs into talkative sentience in the presence of his mistress. By the end of the film, we realise that both lives may or may not be connected by the film’s opening scene. So how did Nilthamrong come to inhabit the mind of a much older character? “It is projection,” he says. The character was borne of age-related pondering: “People in my generation – what do they want to be?” And so Vanishing Point exists as documentation, examination and self-projection, thinly disguised as deflection.
tabloid press hasn’t changed. “His virus is still there.” Dealing with porn, drugs, murder and mysticism, Videophilia plays these same tactics to decode and counterattack: “Although not involved with politics on a basic level, the form is political.” Molero deems European and South American cinema too preoccupied with realism. A possible
fit for the Surrealist Really? Really programme, Videophilia could just be the most ‘fucked-up’ movie in the competition.
La Obra del Siglo / The Project of the Century Hivos Tiger Awards Competition / HBF Sat 31 Jan 14:15 CI5
Vanishing Point Hivos Tiger Awards Competition / HBF Sat 31 Jan 22:00 CI3
Videophilia WINNER
By Ruben Demasure
Former IFFR Trainee Critic Juan Daniel F. Molero is back at the festival with his first feature-length fiction, Videophilia (and Other Viral Syndromes), screening in the Hivos Tiger Awards Competition. Two Lima youngsters meet, first virtually and then in real life. Luz is a teen discovering sexuality and Junior a conspiracy theorist making amateur porn. Molero wanted to unite all the languages we see in our everyday life and on our screens, including animated gifs and glitches. He believes our brain doesn’t separate these once they have escaped into the outside world. Living for fifty years only with screens, a brain can’t evolve that fast. “So in the film, everything clashes. Not outside, but inside us.” Molero describes his film as a “hack” of different genres: comedy, boy-meets-girl movie, apocalypse and supernatural cinema. All together in “this kind of Frankenstein film”, at once (non-)fiction, experimental and video art. “I feel very comfortable in those middle grounds”, he explains. “In high school, I hung out with the stoners but also with the
geeks, in the limbo between being a freak or cool. So what am I?” The filmmaker points out how syncretism (the melding of different, often seemingly contradictory beliefs) has always been a part of Peruvian culture. When the Andean people conquered or were conquered, they always took what they felt was better and integrated it. This is seen in religion, food and music: grounds of appropriation Molero’s film also touches on. “It’s collage without found footage; you can collage upon culture, your own work and aesthetics.” Molero’s mash-up is a reflection on how technology and media affect the way we see ourselves, life, time and space. He believes the fall of president Alberto Fujimori in 2000 relates to how his generation welcomed the internet and blogging at the same moment. Fujimori was brought down with the release of videotapes documenting corruption in all levels of society, including the media. “That gave our generation distrust and a loss of innocence.” Lead actress Muki Sabogal adds that the former ruler’s system of
Happy Ending By Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Beneath the stairs at the Willem Burger Foyer sits a small, stylish man, legs crossed. He is Ando Hiroshi, director of Japanese drama Undulant Fever, which received its international premiere in the Spectrum Premieres section at IFFR. Adapted from a scenario which was itself adapted from a novel, Undulant Fever follows two young people, Emiko and Hiroshi, as they navigate desire and the helpless anguish of unrequited love. Both students in high school when the film opens, Emiko falls in love with Hiroshi. Although rejecting her over-
tures, Hiroshi shows a weakness for her body – but his lust is not specific. Anyone would do, as he tells her. She doesn’t mind; she’ll be his slave. So there it is. Curious about the female response to the submission tending towards subservience at the centre of Undulant Fever, I asked a young woman what she thought. Her response: “the girl had no self-respect.” She looked disgusted. I relay this reading of Emiko’s plight to Ando (through an interpreter). He disagrees. “I am not sure Emiko lacks self-respect,” he says. “The one who
does is Hiroshi, who tries to cover his emotions and not take responsibility. She is okay with expressing her emotions directly.” True, it is possible to see Emiko’s ownership of her body and her decision to hand it to her lover, in spite of his callous nonchalance, as an assertion of her power. As Ando says, “In the end, it is the female who is the victor.” Having worked in the Japanese porn industry and then shooting a mainstream film with scenes of nudity and joyless sex (at least for one of the participants) – how much has the former affected the latter? Ando laughs as our translator mentions “joyless sex” in Japanese, his visage transformed from studied concentration to playful mischief. Knowing what to discard appears seems to be the essential lesson Ando
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Videophilia (and Other Viral Syndromes) Hivos Tiger Awards Competition / HBF / CineMart 2014 Sat 31 Jan 19:15 CI5
learned from his less experienced days in filmmaking. He tells me: “One of the challenges was to do both the serious scenes and the sex scenes in the same style, so the sex scenes do not stand out.” It is a challenge well handled. These scenes come through with the force of emotion rather than titillation. Undulant Fever’s commentary on love is cynical, so I ask Ando if this is his view on romance. “In terms of romance, it is unhappy, but she now has the confidence to go it alone,” he says. “In that sense, it is some kind of a happy ending.” Undulant Fever / Umi o kanjiru toki Spectrum Premieres Sat 31 Jan 12:15 PA2
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