Daily Tiger #8 UK

DAILY TIGER

40TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM #8 THURSDAY 3 FEBRUARy 2011

NEDERLANDSE EDITIE Z.O.Z

Groove raiders: Dutch/Ethiopian combo the Batiband played a mix of modern Ethiopian and traditional African music for guests at the combined CineMart/Raiding Africa Drinks, hosted by the Durban FilmMart in the Juriaanse Foyer in De Doelen yesterday.

photo: Corinne de Korver

Spiced blend As CineMart delegates leave the building to change into their glad-rags ahead of a final night’s revelry, market chief Marit van den Elshout reflects on this year’s event. The ingredients of CineMart 2011 were essentially the same, but the flavour had changed: the dominant spice this year was transmedia. By Nick Cunningham.

“This will be a theme to which we will be returning,” Van den Elshout states. “It was good to see that the transmedia projects had a lot of interest from potential partners. To a degree, everybody knew the producers from their former projects, but it’s the first time the cross-over is so clear; producers who have done arthouse features are now moving into this new field.”

Future

Such was the level of interest in the transmedia projects – in great part generated by filmmaker Anita Ondine’s CineMart and Rotterdam Lab presentations on the subject – Van den Elshout is considering a separate transmedia programme within CineMart 2012. “Through Anita’s demonstration and the discussions around that, it is very important to have the multi-disciplinary people here,” she points out. “To actually get the gaming people and the technical people – that is something that we may well work around next year.”

Van den Elshout was satisfied that the themed power lunches worked, and they too may be formalized into the programme in future years. “During the fund financing meeting, for example, we

realized that all these people from the different national and regional funds don’t talk to each other a lot; only informally, and they never actually meet so regularly about what they are all doing,” she opines. “I think that is also something to work on.”

Balance

In terms of deals struck over the past three days, Dutch producer Marc van Warmerdam enticed Flemish production entity Epidemic into taking a co-pro credit on Camiel Borgman, to be directed

by Alex van Warmerdam. Mexican Mantarraya Producciones announced that French Maharaja Film, Holland’s IDTV and German Rohfilm will join its Tree Shade as co-producers, with Le Pacte handling French distribution. Mantarraya’s Post tenebras lux was picked up for world sales by Le Pacte, as well as French distribution. IDTV will act as Dutch co-producer and the German co-pro credit goes to The Match Factory. Three projects will board the Rotterdam Express to the Berlin Co-production Market: The Cyclops by JukkaPekka Valkeapää, Aneta Lesnikowska’s Loud (the Netherlands/Macedonia) and the Swiss project We Are Dead (Tobias Nölle).

“At CineMart, we always have this discussion about the balance between the bigger names and the emerging first-time feature directors,” Van den Elshout observes. “But I know that, through the popularity of projects such as Providence (Israel) and Karma Police (Thailand), these are precisely what people are looking for here as well.

The balance is right.”

“Somebody told us yesterday that it was clear what we were doing here,” she continues. “In some oth-

er markets, there might be more of a mix of commercial and arthouse, and the arthouse producers would have to defend what they were doing before actually getting into the content of their project.

Here, the context in which you are pitching your project is always clear. It’s nice to know that we have the right mix of young and experienced talent and that the new and emerging filmmakers are very well looked after.”

Popular

For Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu (Amour Fou, Austria) – producer of the Luxembourg/Austria/Belgium co-pro The Night of a Thousand Hours – interest in his project could not have been higher.

“For us, CineMart opened up two fantastic opportunities: one was France, the other was Germany,” he enthused. “The first day we were overrun by French companies, which was very interesting – world sales, distributors, possible co-producers – and it was very interesting to see that the project had a real impact, even though we knew director Virgil Widrich is very popular in France.”

“Strategy-wise, you can gather a lot of interest here – meet a lot of people and see what the potential would be for your project, then you follow up with the right people at the right moment in Berlin,” adds partner Jean-Laurent Csinidis (Minotaurus Film, Luxembourg). “We can check out the whole pool of possibilities and then pick out the best ones.”

“CineMart is the best of these markets, because it seems to have the best quality control over the projects,” comments the Irish Film Board’s Simon Perry.

“So for those of us who come looking for projects, we

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can be sure that everything here will be of some interest some time. Whether it’s precisely right for my fund or our country is another matter, but at least we know that we’re not going to be wading through a brochure which is only half good.”

CineMart Awards The winners of the CineMart awards were announced last night at the market’s closing ceremony. The ARTE France Cinéma Award of €10,000 for Best CineMart project went to Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not (Romania, France). Fien Troch’s Kid (Belgium, the Netherlands) won the Eurimages Award of €30,000 for the best CineMart project with a European partner. The jury also gave a special mention to Ben Russell and Ben Rivers’ A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (Germany, France). On their decision to recognise A Spell..., the jury (consisting of Rémi Burah, General Secretary of RTE France Cinéma and Peter Gustaffson, a Board Member of Eurimages), said: “It’s a social experiment that will unfold, exploring different ways of being a human being in this world.” They added that the film epitomized a trend demonstrated by a number of projects this year: “In the meetings, we encountered a lot of filmmakers who try to push the boundaries between cinema and reality, and by doing so try to create a new type of authenticity.”

Brief encounter

Anita Ondine

photo: Corinne de Korver

Change Platforms “There is no agreed definition of transmedia,” producer and transmedia advocate Anita Ondine tells Nick Cunningham.

“However, I do have a specific way of describing it.

I see transmedia as stories that transcend media. In other words, we put the emphasis back on the story and less on the media.” Ondine is in Rotterdam to bang the drum for transmedia at a series of CineMart and Rotterdam Lab-organised events.

Connections

The transmedia method nevertheless relies on a profusion of platforms to create a complex, entertaining and integrated story world, Ondine argues.

“When we architect this story world at the inception of a project, we build hooks into the story as it exists across multiple platforms,” she points out. “For example, the screenplay for a film would reflect the fact that some of the story gets told elsewhere. This can mean that clues are embedded in the film. Or we see a character exit a film, and on screen we never see what happens to him, but if we want to follow his trajectory then we go onto the internet and see where he went when he left the room, thereby creating real and meaningful connections within the context of the story.”

At the weekend, Ondine gave a masterclass to Rotterdam Lab participants, during which she stressed the importance of creating the business and creative aspects of transmedia in parallel. “The decisions you make on one affect the other immediately, in a way that is more closely correlated than any other media that I have ever been involved in,” Ondine comments.

Visionaries

Later she undertook a series of one-on-one meetings with filmmakers with projects in CineMart to

see how these could be augmented by exposure to the transmedia effect. “This exposes me to a whole range of different story-tellers from around the world. One of the exciting things about working in tramsmedia is that the ground is so fertile for storytelling in this new mode. We are still on the cusp of it taking off, so the people doing it now are the visionaries at the forefront.”

The third component of Ondine’s CineMart was yesterday’s power lunch, during which the transmedia method was appraised within the context of traditional storytelling and its attendant business practices. “What is really important about transmedia is that we need to continue thinking about how we as an industry can become sustainable over the coming years,” she stressed. “In order to be ready for transmedia, we must overcome certain barriers that are in place; not insurmountable, but certain structural issues to do with funding and existing processes which were suitable to a traditional film industry but are no longer reflective of life in 2011.”

Two sides

Gabriel Mascaro, director of CineMart project Bulldown, comments on his transmedia session with Ondine. “In Brazil, there is a huge community of people connected through social networking.

Anita offered a lot of insights into the transmedia potential for the project.”

“There are two sides,” explains Sander Verdonk, producer of CineMart project The Sky Above Us, a film set against the Nato bombing of Belgrade in 1999.

“In general, there is lack of knowledge about this in the Netherlands, but we have several projects which could work very well. On The Sky Above Us we did a lot of research, like a documentary, in order to get the stories for the film, but all this research and these small details not included in the film can be brought out on the internet and through other media.”

Rotterdam regular Nicolas Provost talks to Geoffrey Macnab about his forthcoming projects.

Is that Dennis Hopper? Why is Jack Nicolson in frame? An air of mystery hangs over Nicolas Provost’s latest film, Stardust (a winner in the Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films earlier this week). Stardust is part of a trilogy in which Provost deliberately blurs the lines between fiction, documentary and experimental art film.

“My field of interest is to analyse and question the phenomenon of cinema, its various elements and conventional rules. My work is a reflection on the grammar of cinema and the relationship between visual art and the cinematic experience”, the director states.

Provost shoots with a hidden camera in real locations. Plot Point was made in New York, Stardust in Las Vegas. At the same time, he uses rhetorical devices from Hollywood movies to create narrative tension.

The young Belgian director is currently hard at work on the post-production of his first feature.

The Invader is about immigrants coming to Europe. The main protagonist is an African who has recently arrived Brussels. “He is one of these thousands coming to Europe to find paradise. He meets a beautiful, rich woman, falls in love. She dumps him. He becomes the monster we project on immigrants. He takes the law in his own hands.”

Quietly confident Dutch auteur Nanouk Leopold may be on tenterhooks before the European premiere of her much-anticipated Brownian Movement, screening in Berlinale Forum, but she was relaxed enough yesterday at CineMart to expound both on the profound influence of the IFFR on her career, and on her upcoming project It’s All So Quiet.

“The Forum is really a very good place to start with a film like this,” she continues. “It’s such a difficult film to promote, so you need a very Nanouk Leopold

Submarine ramps UP Peter Greenaway is on the march, with two new features in the pipeline. The finance is coming together for Goltzius and the Pelican Company, the latest feature from the veteran British director, about sixteenth-century Dutch engraver Hendrick Goltzius, an illustrator of erotic printed books. The film will be a co-production between Kasander Film in the Netherlands, Film and Music Entertainment in the UK, CDP in France and Film Afrika in South Africa, and will shoot in Cape Town on a €2 million budget in early summer 2011. Earlier this month, Eurimages came on board to support the project, which is sold internationally by London-based Bankside.

Meanwhile, Femke Wolting of Amsterdam-based Submarine has revealed further details of a subsequent Greenaway project, Eisenstein in Guanajuato. This will tell the story of Russian director’s Sergei Eistenstein’s visit to Hollywood and then Mexico in the early 1930s, and his love affair with his Guanajuato guide and minder – a young, married historian of comparative religions called Palomino Canedo. The director has long been intrigued by the fact that in his early 30s, Eisenstein

was still a virgin, and that he was homosexual.

The script for the €4 million film is now complete.

Submarine is producing. Another Dutch outfit, San Fu Maltha’s Fu Works, is also poised to board the film, as is French coproducer Clement Calvet of Super Prod.

News of the Greenaway project comes as Submarine (co-founded by Wolting and Bruno Felix) continues to ramp up. The company has just been nominated for the award for best interactive fiction at SXSW Festival in March for its game Collapsus, directed by Tommy Pallotta (a long-term collaborator with Richard Linklater).

Other forthcoming Submarine film projects include Shock Head Soul by Simon Pummell. This cross-media doc tells the strange story of Daniel Paul Schreber, the German judge who became convinced that God was trying to turn him into a woman. Famous as an outsider artist, Schreber was a successful lawyer, who in 1893 started to receive messages from God through a ‘Writing Down Machine’ that spanned the cosmos.

He spent the next nine years confined to an asylum.

The coproducers are Keith Griffiths and Janine Marmot. Geoffrey Macnab

Provost is at pains to point out that the film isn’t a polemic. “I am really not trying to make a political film at all.” The Invader has elements of a western, and is also inspired by anti-hero Hollywood movies of the 70s and 80s like Taxi Driver. The cast includes Italian actress Stefania Rocca (best known for The Talented Mr Ripley and Dracula) and, as the immigrant, Issaka Sawadogo and is being made through Versus Production.

An arch perfectionist who pays exhaustive attention to lighting and cinematography, Provost acknowledges it was sometimes a struggle to shoot on the streets of Brussels. What irked him the most were the dirty yellow street lights. “To me, they are very ugly and shabby. They take away all the colours.” Thankfully, using an Alexa camera, he and his cinematographer were able to “eliminate the yellow before the post-production. It just solved our problem. We were actually thinking about changing the lights!”

The Invader will be ready in the late summer.

Meanwhile, Provost is already at work on the third part of the trilogy that included Plot Point and Stardust. The third title, which is being shot in Tokyo, takes his mix of hidden camera verité and fiction a step further. He is working with an actor who plays a serial killer but who “interacts with reality.” As for Stardust, he isn’t yet ready to reveal just how he managed to enlist Hopper, Jack Nicholson and co. All he will say is: “I met them.

I was allowed to film – and they were warm and brief encounters.”

photo: Lucia Guglielmetti

good and a sympathetic platform.”

Rotterdam and its festival is, nevertheless, her spiritual home. “I was born in Rotterdam and I first went to this festival when I was 16. My whole education was watching these strange Russian films and Asian films and ‘Hungarian people shitting on the roof ’ kind of films. It really woke me up and it was amazing to see what was possible within this medium of film.”

Leopold has completed the script for It’s All So Quiet and hopes to shoot winter 2011/12, after the finance is raised. Long-term collaborator Stienette Bosklopper of Circe Film will produce.

The film, about the relationship between a farmer and a son who all his life has hidden the fact that he is gay, is budgeted at €2.5 million. “The budget for Brownian Movement was €2.7 million and it was quite incredible that we could make this film the way that we did,” she explains – much of Brownian Movement was shot in the Le Corbusier-designed buildings of Ahmedabad, India.

“It’s All So Quiet has a similar budget,” she underlines. “We will try to make it a co-production with Germany and Belgium. That’s the idea to bring in more money. These are really difficult times and my films are really in the category of difficult to sell, and it is very hard to ask for money. In my country films are now called a leftist hobby [referring to a recent pronouncement

by Dutch politician Geert Wilders]. And I am the extreme leftist hobbyist.” Nick Cunningham

Africa Calling Toni Monty of the Durban FilmMart, which signed up as a CineMart partner for 2011, speaks to the Daily Tiger about her inaugural event, in July 2010, and the application of the CineMart model to the event’s modus operandi. “We came here three years ago to look at CineMart to see how the market works, and out of all the markets we had investigated, we saw the CineMart as the most accessible platform for filmmakers,” she stressed. “The Durban FilmMart last year was a great success, beyond our expectations actually – we approached it very cautiously as it was our first market.”

The Durban event was launched to provide film professionals from across Africa an opportunity to pitch their projects to a selection of financiers, distributors and sales agents. The four-day event attracted 200 international professionals to hear 12 pitches. One of these projects, Hossam Elouan and Ibrahim El Batout’s Hawi, was selected for IFFR Spectrum section this year.

“The business of these markets is the network, to connect, and the real work begins after the market is over,” Monty adds. “In Durban, the feedback we started getting about the projects after the market was really impressive. The network continued, and that was what was important. For us, it was always about creating access to market for Africa. In Africa, it’s not as simple as jumping on a train and travelling to the nearest market. Africa is really limited in opportunities for these kinds of platforms to access professionals and to seek funding, and the Durban FilmMart will, hopefully, continue to provide that.” Nick Cunningham

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Body of evidence A gruesome real-life incident inspired Tiger competitor Carlos Moreno to make Todos tus muertos. By Ben Walters.

“There’s a saying that one dead person is a tragedy but a thousand is just a number,” says Colombian filmmaker Carlos Moreno. The sense of the dehumanizing effect of large-scale killing laces his Tiger entry, Todos tus muertos, but rather than indignation or sobriety, the tone is absurd pragmatism.

When a maize farmer stumbles across 50 corpses dumped in his field, he struggles to interest the authorities in his discovery; once he has, their concern is for logistics, rather than law or morality.

“A journalist friend of mine heard about a tragedy at the border of two towns near where we live,” recalls Moreno, whose debut feature was Dog Eat Dog (2008). “He went there and found a pile of bodies – not as big as the one in the film – but what shocked him even more was that the mayors of the two villages weren’t trying to find out who was responsible, but arguing over which town would have to have the statistics on their books.”

Black humour seemed the best way to approach such grim yet endemic problems. “It’s a way to shorten the distance between the audience and the situation,” Moreno suggests. “When you’re dealing with these tragedies, someone must be blamed, but you don’t want to be blamed – you think you have nothing to do with it, so you create distance.

If people get involved with the film’s situation, they might feel they have some responsibility.”

Developed in a collaborative manner, Todos tus muertos often has a theatrical, enclosed feel – much of the action takes place in the concealed clearing in the farmer’s field. “We had a small team,” Moreno says, “an intimate group of friends committed to the story. The actors all had experience of writing or directing, which helped the collective creation of the universe of the story. And the locations are almost exactly as we found them: the mayor’s office is the mayor’s office, the police station is the police station, the farmer’s home is a farmer’s home. The cornfield became almost like a stage, a theatrical space.” In fact, the actors subsequently developed the story as a stage play.

Yet Moreno also offers conspicuously cinematic sound design and numerous overhead shots. “We had a crane for two days,” he reports. “The idea was to have different perspectives on the same situation. It looks one way from the ground with the handheld camera, but if we see it from above, it shows how we look at these things from a distance.

From the outside, you can’t touch it or smell it.”

Despite the potentially controversial subject matter, Todos tus muertos met little resistance as a project. “We had support from the Colombian Film Fund, which is government backed, and from the local mayor and police where we shot,” Moreno says. “We don’t foresee trouble – we don’t name names. It’s a metaphor for how society revolves around conflict. And if there are objections, we prefer to apologise afterwards than seek permission before.”

Todos tus muertos – Carlos Moreno

Todos tus muertos

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La BM du Seigneur

Caravan confessional Jean-Charles Hue tells Edward Lawrenson about the real-life inspiration behind his gypsy drama La BM du Seigneur.

“I met a family of travelers about 15 years ago,” explains Jean-Charles Hue on the process that led to La BM du Seigneur, “and seven years later I started to make films about them”.

A raucous, closely observed drama set among the trailer homes of a gypsy community in the north of Paris, La BM du Seigneur received its international premiere at IFFR on Saturday. The film follows Fred Dorkel, a heavy-set, thirty-something professional thief who changes his illegal practices when he has an unlikely religious epiphany in his cramped caravan.

The movie is in fact drawn from an episode in the life of the real-life Fred Dorkel. Having known Dorkel for a long time, Hue persuaded him to play himself in this feature-film re-enactment. Making the movie was, says Hue, something of a spiritual exercise for his lead actor. “Dorkel converted to a brand of protestant evangelicalism” Hue explains, “and he had to make a kind of confession about the life he led before. Fred understood this movie could be a form of confession, but to a much wider public

than his fellow congregants.”

Filming in trailer park in Beauvais (allocated by the authorities to the travelling community for two years), Hue also lived among his cast. He filmed them for around two months, then with a small crew for a few more weeks: “I didn’t touch anything,” he says of his locations, “The caravans, and everything else, were exactly as I found them.”

While he was making the movie, controversy developed around the place of the gypsy community in France, with President Sarkozy drawing sharp criticism for his expulsion of hundreds of Roma to Romania and Bulgaria. “I thought it could be a catastrophe”, Hue recalls of his worries the film may reinforce stereotypes. Although sympathetic to its characters, his film is sometime violent and depicts its characters operating outside the law. But Hue has been reassured by the positive response from his real-life subjects.

“You have people like Sarkozy demonizing the travelers, and on the other extreme commentators on the left say the travelers are very good guys, there aren’t any thieves in their community, all the children go to school.” Hue adds: “It’s more complicated than that.”

La BM du Seigneur – Jean-Charles Hue

Thur 03 09:45 PA5

No rest for the wicked “Norway is a small and very nationalistic country that really loves its heroes.

But they don’t like to talk much about the dark side.” So says actor Stellan Skarsgård of his latest film, King of Devil’s Island. “There was a very successful Norwegian film last year about a freedom fighter during the second world war. If that film shows the front of the Norwegian flag, we’re showing the back.” By Edward Lawrenson.

King of Devil’s Island draws on a disturbing true-life episode from 1915 in which young male inmates of a correctional facility on an island near Oslo re-

Stellan Skarsgård

volted against their horrendous conditions. Working with director Marius Holst, Skarsgård plays the institution’s imposing governor, the man responsible for the arduous, punishing regime its teenage prisoners endure.

In a typically nuanced performance, Skarsgård avoids turning the governor into a one-dimensional villain, while never softening his cruel streak.

“It’s a genre movie, like The Great Escape or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And of course the function of the governor is to be the oppressor,” says Skarsgård: “I got worried when I read it first because he’s obviously the bad guy, and I don’t believe in bad guys and good guys. So we started adding scenes that complicated his life. Then we realized his function had to be simpler, and so we had to

photo: Corinne de Korver

work out other ways of making him richer. But developing those extra scenes was useful: when we took them away, the essence of them still remained in my acting.”

The film is the second recent Norwegian production for the Swedish actor. Before working on King of Devil’s Island, Skarsgård gave a hilariously droll performance as an aging Oslo ex-con in Hans Petter Molland’s A Somewhat Gentle Man: “One producer had already turned it down,” Skarsgård recalls when he was sent the script: “He thought it was a very dark and tragic story. And I read it, and thought it was a comedy!”

Alongside such smaller-scale, more edgy European movies, Skarsgård has a high-profile career in Hollywood movies, including Mamma Mia and “that Dan Brown thing” (as he describes Angels and Insects). “It helps financing the smaller projects,” he notes of these big-budget movies: “The good thing is that backers are not usually smart people. So when they’re going to finance an independent, edgy movie, and they see Skarsgård is in it, they check how much my films have made and then they say ‘Oh, a billion dollars – that must be a great investment’ – and then they invest in this small film that nobody will see!”

Visiting Rotterdam for the first time, Skarsgård has been too busy promoting the film to see much of the city, although he did manage a visit to IFFR’s latenight drinking spot, the Bar Centraal: “A table full of drinks poured over me. It was very nice,” he deadpans. Next it’s back to Sweden to continue shooting with David Fincher on the English-language version of The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. Skarsgård admires the US director’s meticulous approach (“he’s not at all anal, he just wants to try different things, which is great for an actor”), but it has nonetheless made for

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a long shoot. “Originally I was scheduled to end in April,” Skarsgård says, “Then it got pushed to May, then June, then July – and now they’re calling to ask me if I’m free in August!”

King of Devil’s Island – Marius Holst

Thur 03 09:30 PA7

Remembering Rotterdam As part of our commemorative coverage of the IFFR’s fortieth anniversary, IMDb’s Festival Strategy head Christian Gaines shares his most vivid memories of the event.

My first Rotterdam festival was 1998. I was the newish Director of the Hawaii International Film Festival at the time – enthusiastic but terribly green. Back home, I was mired in board politics, incessant queries about which Hollywood movies, which celebrities, we could secure. Simon Field was authoritative, commanding, but affable and approachable, to a fault. I remember marveling: What other major film festival in the world would ever program Garin Nugroho’s Leaf on a Pillow for Opening Night? Rotterdam did because, quite simply, it was a masterpiece that deserved to be seen. I return as often as possible because Rotterdam always reminds me of the great responsibility a film festival has to its filmmakers and audiences.

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Rotterdam Reconstructed Tonight at 8pm, the Schouwburg Grote Zaal hosts the first public screening of the restoration of the celebrated silent era film about Rotterdam, The City That Never Rests (1928). By Geoffrey Macnab.

changing. Within two or three years, the film seemed out of date.”

One of the fascinations about The City That Never Rests today is that it portrays a Rotterdam perched between two worlds. On the one hand, the city von Barsy shows is sleepy, traditional and very picturesque. On the other, it is embracing modernity.

“The film is a mixture of images of the inner part of Rotterdam, the old city centre, and the harbour. The inner part doesn’t exist any more … and that’s why it is very special”, Monizza says.

In other words, the restoration will offer festivalgoers an opportunity to step back in time into a Rotterdam that is no longer really there.

This was a movie made primarily for marketing purposes – it was commissioned to showcase Rotterdam’s attractions to potential investors. However, the film (directed by Friedrich von Maydell) was shot by the brilliant Hungarian photographer and cinematographer, Andor von Barsy.

26

Modernity and lyricism

In 1926, von Barsy, originally from Hungary but educated in Munich as a cameraman, had been lured to Rotterdam to work on a promotional film about the city and its industries. This proved to be a financial failure, even though his camera work was well received. Von Barsy was then asked to work for Transfilma, a film company formed by some young German aristocrats – among them Friedrich von Maydell. They too had plans to promote Rotterdam and its industrial life on screen.

This was the era of modernism and of dynamic films extolling city life. The Transfilma team wanted to make a movie akin to Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927). The city council was too cautious to go along with such a radical idea. They opted instead to commission a more practical and functional documentary, showcasing Rotterdam’s industrial heartland. However, thanks to von Barsy’s brilliant camera work, the film transcended its rather prosaic origins. Von Barsy threw in high angle shots of street scenes in which we see cars and horse-drawn carts; imagery of barges, warehouses and of boats being unloaded.

Bustle and lyricism went side by side.

Cut and paste

The City That Never Rests (Dutch title: De stad die nooit rust) has been restored by the EYE Film Institute in partnership with Rotterdam City Archives. Meanwhile, the Nederlands Fotomuseum

is hosting an exhibition of von Barsy’s photographs of the city. As EYE’s collection specialist Simona Monizza points out, this has been a very challenging restoration. “The story of this film is just very chaotic,” Monizza states. The original negative of the film has long since disappeared.

Instead, the restorers were obliged to piece the movie together in painstaking fashion. “The material is scattered all around, in different cans, with different names.”

Previous attempts at restoration stalled because it was just so difficult to assemble all the footage needed. The problems began not long after the film’s release, when the rights were sold to a company in Germany. The new German owners started chopping the film up, using segments of it in separate short documentaries.

The City That Never Rests premiered in August 1928 to very enthusiastic reviews. The camer-

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Sight and sound

awork was immediately recognised by the critics as being of very high quality.

These reviews have helped the restorers plot their way through the archive footage they have been reassembling so diligently from so many sources. As they pieced the film back together, they contacted archives in Britain, Germany and France and also explored local Dutch archives.

They knew that the film had been re-released in a shorter version in several different languages.

Their reconstruction has been taken from six different sources.

Old and new

“The reason why this film has a very troubled history is that it was commissioned to promote the commercial aspect of the city and the harbour, but the city was changing very fast,” notes Monizza. “All the technologies behind the harbour were

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It’s not only the sights of the city that once was which will greet the audience tonight. They’ll also have a chance to experience the sounds of late 1920s Rotterdam too. Sound expert Charly van Rest has reportedly scoured archives in order to track down original sounds that would work with the images.

(There is also music from Pierre Bastien.)

Von Barsy himself realised his film was out of date. In the 1930s, he made a new film, Between Arrival and Departure, which showed new footage of the harbour.

Monizza herself is clearly delighted at how the restoration has turned out. She speaks with enthusiasm of watching the film on the big screen for the first time. “It’s very special,” she enthuses. “This is first and foremost a very beautifully shot film … it shows a city that doesn’t exist any more and it shows how beautiful the old city of Rotterdam was. It made sense when I finally saw it projected.

When you work on a restoration, you work mostly on a small screen on a flat table. On the big screen, you can finally enjoy it cinematographically.”

“The City That Never Rests is very good at picturing people. It is not just abstract images of buildings and boats. In almost every shot, there is someone doing something. I love the shots of the huge, huge boats being manoeuvred or people washing themselves – just normal life on the boats.”