Daily Tiger #4 (English) by International Film Festival Rotterdam

The CineMart team, from left to right: Inke Van Loocke, Jolinde den Haas, David Pope, Jacobine van der Vloed, Tobias Pausinger, Nienke Poelsma, Marit van den Elshout and Emmy Sidiras.

photo: Nadine Maas

Practical effect IFFR Head of Industry & CineMart Marit van den Elshout emphasises that programmes such as Boost! and Art:Film point the way ahead in these financially challenging times. By Nick Cunningham

“We have to take into account that, even though it has always been difficult to finance projects, it is not getting any easier – in fact it is getting much harder”, she underlines. “So we are strict in our selection process. This year, we looked even more at financial plans and at what the projects could achieve here.” Equally, qualifying status was determined by an impressive track record, as in the case of Alex van Warmerdam’s Number Nine (produced by his brother Marc). “With such a well-known director/producer team, we know how they use the fact of being here, that for them it is really the start of the film’s career.” Most meetings

CineMart 2013 presents 33 projects from 31 countries, of which five are in the Art: Film sidebar and another four in Boost! Sixteen projects pitched at CineMarts past are in this year’s IFFR selection, of which three (Guido van Driel’s opening film The Resurrection of a Bastard, Ricky Rijneke’s Silent Ones and Dummy Jim by Matt Hulse) compete in the Hivos Tiger Awards Competition.

Frédérick Pelletier’s Diego Star competes in the inaugural Big Screen Award Competition. Interestingly, a record five Dutch projects are in CineMart selection this year. “Because of the cultural funding situation and because Dutch films are having a difficult time, we wanted to look at what we could do for the Dutch film industry”, Van den Elshout comments. “But then we received such a lot of very good projects from the Dutch and it was very easy for us to select them anyway.” The Dutch selection reads like a who’s who of emerging and established talent, ranging from Boudewijn Koole, whose Kauwboy was the Dutch Academy Foreign-language Oscar submission to David Verbeek (How to Describe a Cloud, Big Screen Award Competition, see page 7), whose CineMart project Dead and Beautiful is, he says, 80% financed. Verbeek notes that success is never guaranteed at co-production markets (given that assurances for co-operation can be offered before home finances are in place), but solid activity is more likely at CineMart than at most other markets. “CineMart is the one that is most tightly organised, that gives you the most meetings, that offers the most interesting partners”, he stresses. Feel the feedback

CineMart debutante Dominga Sotomayor (CineMart project: Tarde para morir joven) picked up a Tiger Award

at IFFR 2012 with De jueves a domingo, which received HBF script and development support. Her producer is CineMart veteran Benjamin Domenech of Argentinean Rei Cine. “I am curious about the (upcoming) experience at CineMart”, explains Sotomayor. “My idea is to meet creative co-producers, to involve people in a project that is still at early script stage. The idea is to make the project a little bit more real and to find the reaction of the people and to see if there is something concrete I can react to in turn. It is essential to feel the feedback at CineMart.” Money on the table

The Art:Film programme (see page 3), co-initiated with the Danish CPH:DOX is designed to marry radical art house cinema and artists’ films with the money. “Of course, over the past few years we have had projects by artists making their first feature, but we needed to get more financial partners to the table”, explains CineMart manager Jacobine van der Vloed. “Last year, we had a big art film panel but at a certain point you are done with the talking and you need to be more practical.” Easy access

In recent years, there has also been a lot of talk also on the subject of transmedia, but this year there are no such projects in CineMart selection. “The stories and the experts and the issues (within transmedia) are the

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same and we still remain open to these sort of projects, but I don’t think their content really always reflects the festival’s profile”, Van den Elshout comments. Way forward

Van den Elshout instead emphasises that programmes like Boost! and Art:Film are the way forward and serve to re-enforce the connection with other parts of IFFR, such as the HBF and the programme sections. And of course, the networking possibilities offered by CineMart and IFFR remain a key benefit for attendees, she adds. “We work a lot on making connections within at the festival – the Rotterdam Lab, the consultancy meetings, the Film Office panel programmes that connect the filmmakers in the festival – and in doing so, we try to add value to the films premiering here, and the projects presented at CineMart.” “People come to Rotterdam with an agenda to find new stuff, new films, new installations and new filmmakers to work with and that will always remain the same”, she concludes. “We are a festival that is easy to navigate and where professionals are very accessible. Everything takes place in one building, so CineMart remains an economically interesting way to meet with as many people in as short an amount of time as possible.”

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International Film Festival Rotterdam and Under The Milky Way are proud to present

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Is it art? Art:Film, a new initiative to support artistic cinema and the visual arts, launches in Rotterdam. By Geoffrey Macnab

Kate Ogborn and Randall Wright

photo: Nadine Maas

The big screen A new doc on David Hockney is to be pitched at this year’s CineMart. By Geoffrey Macnab

David Hockney: A Life In Pictures, a new feature doc about the celebrated English artist, promises to reveal in full Hockney’s passion for filmmaking and for cinema. The doc (pitched in CineMart by its producer Kate Ogborn and director Randall Wright) is being made with Hockney’s blessing and with his direct participation. Hockney’s love affair with cinema began when he was a boy, growing up in a cramped terraced house in a working-class community in Yorkshire. “His natural instinct was to find something big and open to see the colour in. He fell in love with cinema because it was a big picture of the world and he wanted to paint big”, Wright says. BBC Arts is already aboard the project (being made through Fly Film Company and Blakeway Productions.)

Dream shorts in the Tea House Nasrine Médard de Chardon produces and distributes films from all genres. At IFFR, her company Dreamlab Films presents the features Parviz (Majid Barzegar) and Taboor (Vahid Vakilifar). Drop in to the Tea House at 4 p.m. today to find out which short films Nasrine has brought to Rotterdam. Tea House/Gallery Inside Iran, Schouwburgplein 54, 4 p.m. – 6 p.m.

Money for Time Attending this year’s CineMart with Late To Die Young, Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor is to co-direct a short with Polish filmmaker Katarzyna Klimiewicz. Entitled The Time Before, the project is to seek its €10,000 budget through an Indiegogo campaign launched this week. To be shot in March on the Chilean island of Chiloé, the collaboration was initiated by a 2012 CPH:DOX lab. Cinestacion’s Rebeca Gutiérrez and New Europe Film Sales’ Jan Naszewski are also attached.

Director Wright first collaborated with Hockney on his documentary Shock of the Old. “David had recently discovered that artists used optical equipment to depict very difficult, complicated objects. He was looking at an Ingres painting that looked just like a photograph”, Wright recalls. Wright and Hockney became good friends, also working on Secret Knowledge (2002) together. “He sees an enormous continuity between optical images and hand-made images. He has always used cameras and now (uses) iPads and iPhones – all sorts of technology to make pictures.” As Wright discovered, Hockney has made many films. They have never before been seen in public. These are works of art that the art world “can’t quite come to terms with because it can’t define them as painting or prints or installations.” The films are “descriptions of spaces and moments that he felt the camera was appropriate to describe, rather than to sit down and draw and paint.” Many are about journeys. Hockney has also created a series of photo albums chronicling his life.

“He is such a protean force. There is an enormous amount to David Hockney people don’t know about. There is an enormous amount of art that no-one has ever seen. The documentary is an opportunity to put all this material together”, Wright states. The new doc will also delve into Hockney’s background: his Yorkshire roots and his escape, first to art school and then to Hollywood. “He left this dream world which he had spent so many years creating and then came all the way back. He is now living in his mother’s home in Bridlington.” Producer Ogborn has brought the project to CineMart “partly because of the work that CineMart have been doing around art and film”. Although the BBC is behind it and most of Wright’s work, including his much-feted Lucian Freud: A Painted Life (2012), has been made for TV, the filmmakers are determined that the Hockney doc should be seen on the big screen. Hockney shares their sentiments. “He would love it to be a (theatrical) film”, Wright says. “He would love to see the paintings on a big scale.”

Repeat offender Former Tiger competitor Michael Noer returns to IFFR with the gritty Northwest. By Geoffrey Macnab

Rotterdam may not have a fully-fledged sales market, but the festival can still prove the perfect launch pad for certain films. That, at least, is the opinion of Scandinavian sales outfit TrustNordisk’s CEO, Rikke Ennis. In 2010, Michael Noer’s debut feature R, co-directed by Tobias Lindholm and starring Pilou Asbæk (of Borgen fame) competed in IFFR’s Tiger Awards Competition. Ennis says that Rotterdam helped “position” the prison drama with international buyers. Critics saw and admired the film. This gave R extra momentum when the film went on to have market screenings elsewhere. TrustNordisk sold R very widely, eventually securing a US deal with Olive Films. It was released in the UK by Soda Pictures as R: Hit First, Hit Hardest. Some reviewers even preferred it to Jacques Audiard’s similarly themed A Prophet – one of the biggest art house successes of the year.

Now, Noer is back in Rotterdam with his second feature, Northwest, and TrustNordisk is pursuing the same sales strategy. Northwest has impressive credentials – it was co-scripted by Rasmus Heisterberg, who wrote the Oscar-nominated A Royal Affair. In advance of its festival debut, programmers have been talking up the crime drama’s “grittiness” and “authenticity”; the same qualities that defined the equally intense R. The idea is to hit first with a screening of the crime drama in IFFR’s Bright Future. The film is one of the contenders for the Big Screen Award Competition. The film will then go on to Gothenburg, where it will be seen by Scandinavian audiences for the first time (prior to its Danish release in April). This should put plenty of wind behind Northwest before it arrives in Berlin for its market debut at the European Film Market early next month. Distributors may not acquire Northwest on the back of its Rotterdam screenings alone but the festival – Rikke Ennis believes – still has a crucial part to play in the film’s international roll-out.

CineMart Panels today 11 a.m. -12.30 p.m. Expert Panel: Small step or giant leap? Making the transition from short to feature. 2 p.m.-3.30 p.m. Expert Panel: Creativity and script development. Industry Club, de Doelen 4th floor, limited access

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Art and film – worlds that have always overlapped. From Dalí to Warhol, from Apichatpong ‘Joe’ Weerasethakul to Steve McQueen, there are plenty of examples of directors coming from the field of visual arts – and of artists coming from film. Questions remain, though, just how well the two worlds complement one another. A new initiative has been launched in Rotterdam this year to support artistic cinema and the visual arts. Christened Art:Film, it is a joint endeavour between IFFR/CineMart and Copenhagen documentary festival CPH:DOX. Art:Film is showcasing a number of visual art/ cinema projects in the CineMart. One of the stated goals of the initiative is to facilitate the financing, marketing, distribution and exhibition of the selected art projects. “I think it is about it being really fertile ground for collaboration”, suggests British producer Kate Ogborn, who is pitching Randall Wright’s feature doc David Hockney: A Life In Pictures in CineMart (see left). “As audiences fragment, there are less hard and fast divisions about where you see films, where ideas come from – who is a filmmaker and who is an artist. I think the filmmakers who are successfully working in that territory as artists are recognised as artists in their own right. I don’t think it is necessarily a route for a narrative filmmaker who has no connection in that world or no credibility in that world.” Some argue that film financiers are now looking to gallery owners and museums for support as their own conventional sources of funding dry up in an age of austerity. At the same time, though, more and more visual artists are looking to express themselves in long-form narrative feature films. “The cynical view would be that money is getting tighter … there is this idea that there are people over there with lots of money”, artist-filmmaker Ben Russell commented during Saturday’s panel on How Can a Film Festival Contribute to a Lively Art Film Scene? Also at this panel, filmmaker Matt Hulse pinpointed the tensions that still exist between the two worlds. In 2007, he presented his project Dummy Jim at CineMart. “There was a lot of fuss around the film. We had the most amount of meetings”, Hulse recalled of the interest the project generated. This, though, turned out to be a “house of cards.” No real support materialized. The film (screening in the Hivos Tiger Awards Competition) has taken 13 years to bring to fruition. Hulse talked of his frustration as an artist that he had to present his ideas to potential backers in written form, as a 90-page, double-spaced film script. That is what the film financiers like to be pitched. They’re resistant to artists presenting their ideas through images or sounds. When it comes to distribution, there are tensions too. This was underlined a decade ago when American artist Matthew Barney’s work – especially his Cremaster cycle – began to be shown widely on the festival circuit. Distributors were keen to acquire Barney’s work for theatrical release, but much of it was being sold as limited-edition CDs, like paintings or sculptures. The New York Times reported that some of Barney’s pieces had sold at auction for up to $387,500 – a little more than you would expect to pay for a DVD at your local store. Even today, in 2013, hoary old debates about the exclusivity of art versus the accessibility of film are still being held. “I don’t think many galleries understand … they are not so interested in getting into that – producing film,” commented Abina Manning of Video Data Bank (which promotes artists’ film and video work). Another question is how well work made for the gallery plays in cinemas at film festivals – or how feature-length movies are received in galleries. As the participants in the panel made clear, the gallery and the cinema are very different spaces. At film festivals, Belgian artist and filmmaker Anouk De Clercq noted, “you’re part of this ritual where the lights go down and the projector lights up the screen … in the museum, it’s just a different situation. You have a wandering crowd. Most of the time, they fall into your work.”

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Beyond the clouds Mexican director Eduardo Villanueva’s Penumbra finds a mystical power in the traditional hunting rituals of its elderly hero. By Edward Lawrenson

“This film is a kind of a portrait that plays between fiction and reality”, says Mexican director Eduardo Villanueva about Penumbra, which has its world premiere in the Hivos Tiger Awards Competition strand. Set in a remote rural corner of the Mexican state of Colima, this is a slow-burning, beautifully crafted depiction of an old man’s domestic routines and the regular hunting expeditions he makes into the forest. Featuring a performance of quiet conviction by Adelelmo Jimenez as the elderly hunter, it is, Villanueva says, partly inspired by Adelelmo’s own experience: “He used to work

on a ranch on my property, and sometimes when we were horseback-riding he used to tell me stories about his time hunting. He started to hunt when he was eight years old, imagine that!” But while Penumbra accurately portrays a way of life fast disappearing (“There are no more young people in the fields today and the countryside is changing dramatically”), this film eschews documentary realism. Lovingly shot on Super 16mm in the soft, forgiving light between day and nightfall, the movie has an impressive painterly richness, and Villanueva is quick to acknowledge among his visual inspirations such artists as José de Ribera, Caravaggio, Francisco Ribalta and Francisco de Zurbará. There is a haunting mystical aspect to the film, too (partly drawn from the work of the great Mexican writer Juan Ruflo, who lived in the area). A potent mix of primi-

tive superstition and Catholicism infuses Adelelmo’s hunting rituals. And Villanueva’s imagery often has a dreamlike intensity or finds a meditative power in the landscapes through which Adelelmo walks. “Sometimes, if you are lucky, through a nice camera movement together with the right performance in the right context, you can provoke a sensation that will resonate at a deep unconscious level”, says Villanueva of his film’s rich and strange impact. Villanueva had a very fine stroke of luck for one particular moment of visual grace: a group of clouds breaking up momentarily form the image of a deer, the animal that Adelelmo is hunting. “The curious thing is that I didn’t see the figure of the deer when we were shooting, only after the material was developed. It was a fortuitous accident but I was really happy to have found this beautiful gift.”

Having received Hubert Bals Fund support for his $500,000 budget (“They are amazing, gentle, super-warm people”, he says of the HBF administrators), Villanueva is yet to secure a sales agent. “I have been in contact with many companies around the world, but I have decided to wait a bit, so I can choose the right one. It’s important to see who you’re getting married to!”

Hivos Tiger Awards Competition Penumbra – Eduardo Villanueva

Sun 27 Jan 18:30 PA7 Sun 27 Jan 21:45 CI3 (press & industry) Mon 28 Jan 12:30 PA7 PA3 Tue 29 Jan 13:15 PA6 Sat 02 Feb 15:15

A little night music The evocative potential of sound is explored in Leonardo Brzezicki’s poignant Tiger entrant Noche. By Edward Lawrenson

Girl guide Loosely based on a real-life story, A Fallible Girl – making its world premiere in Bright Future – tells the story of Li Fei (Sang Juan), a young Chinese woman living in Dubai. By Ben Walters

An aspiring entrepreneur, Li Fei runs a small mushroom farm in the desert in partnership with her friend Yaya (Huang Lu) while trying to balance the material, emotional and social vagaries of transnational life. It’s a milieu with which UK-born director Conrad Clark is familiar. Having studied anthropology and filmmaking, he made his first feature, 2007’s Soul Carriage, in China, then found himself in Dubai, helping to produce a film for one of his collaborators. “I was meeting all sorts of people and seeing Dubai through the eyes of the Chinese community”, he recalls. “Dubai has all these different layers of society that hang out in different areas. You can live there and not realise there’s about 200,000 Chinese people.” A Fallible Girl emerged as an attempt, influenced by Clark’s anthropological training, to depict a little-seen aspect of contemporary reality. “Dubai has its past – the pre-oil Emirati culture – and it has the future: the Dubai they’re trying to build, the fantastic skyscrapers, the technological vision of the future. And the thing that’s often missing is the present. I had a little way in to examine that: can I tell one story of present-day Dubai, not from a judgemental point of view, just play out one story?” After months of trying to cast his lead in China, Clark discovered Sang Juan living in Dubai: she was new to

acting but knew the city and the subject matter. “I’d worked with a nonprofessional actor in the lead on my first film too”, Clark says. “It opens up the door: she was my guide as much as I was her director.” To shoot in Dubai, Clark had to apply for official script licensing. “But it wasn’t a fixed 90-page script”, he says. “We approached it as an unstructured feature docu-drama kind of thing with space to go one way or another. The film was initially going to be focused on one girl’s journey, and her relationship with her boyfriend. But Sang Juan and Huang Lu had such a great dynamic, we moved more towards that.” Clark and DoP Raquel Fernandez Nuñez shot on 16mm, paying close attention to the hot-house mushrooms as well as people beneath bright urban lights – subjects with certain similarities. It’s hard not to think of Dubai itself when Clark talks of the “massive contradiction” of “buying a piece of desert land and trying to grow mushrooms, which like moist climates, so pumping in all this air conditioning”. It remains to be seen whether A Fallible Girl will be released in either Dubai or China; “we wouldn’t be the first indie art house Chinese movie not to get a license there”, Conrad notes. But you never know how ambitious enterprises will turn out.

“I lived abroad for quite a while and when I came back to Buenos Aires, members of my close family had passed away. It was a very weird time, a period when I had a lot of made-up conversations in my head, invoking the sounds of these people, dreaming of them both in gentle dreams and deep nightmares.” Leonardo Brzezicki is talking about the events that lay behind Noche (Night), his debut feature that receives its world premiere in the Hivos Tiger Awards Competiton strand. It is telling that he refers to the death of loved ones, because the film he went on to make is haunted by a sense of loss. In a remote house in verdant rural surroundings – actually a farm in Entre Rios, just 300 kilometers from Buenos Aires – six twentysomethings gather, drawn together to commemorate Miguel, a friend who recently committed suicide. Sound is key to the film, as both a dramatic and a stylistic device. Miguel was a field recordist, obsessively recording fragments of everyday life, and his friends relive their memories of him by playing back the audio he left behind – sounds that Brzezicki himself captured in the run-up and during the shoot. Sound, Brzezicki argues, often evokes memories of an event or a person in a more evocative way than imagery: “I think something very special is triggered with sound in our minds. We don’t judge what we listen to as much as what we see, and the information we process enters us at a more subconscious and emotional level.” Mixing Miguel’s ‘recordings’ with the friends’ dialogue and the sounds of their immediate environment, Noche

features a beautifully layered sound design that complements and sometimes works against the film’s visuals. “I was talking the other day with Filip [Gsella], the editor, and with Leandro [de Loredo] the sound designer, and we were saying that this film is a bit like painting, the process is very plastic and organic. Sometimes you try something, you juxtapose an image with a different sound and something special happens that you cannot name.” For all its sonic ambition, Noche is also a film of visual elegance. The movie’s contemplative approach to landscape is signalled by an extraordinary opening shot that depicts an open field in the emerging dawn light: “It was the first day of the shoot, one day before the arrival of the actors,” says Brzezicki, “and my assistant director was telling me, ‘Leo, you can’t take that much time for one shot, we are never going to finish the film.’ Luckily we did ... but he was right, we could never afford such a long time for another shot in the film!” The film’s post-production was supported by the Hubert Bals Fund, help for which Brzezicki is very grateful: “Without it we could have not done it”. He continues: “We’ve yet to a find sales agent. I’ve just finished the film, and I’ll be arriving in Rotterdam with it under my arm!”

Hivos Tiger Awards Competition Noche / Night – Leonardo Brzezicki

Sun 27 Jan 09:00 CI3 (press & industry) Sun 27 Jan 18:45 PA5 Mon 28 Jan 09:30 PA5 (press & industry) Mon 28 Jan 18:30 PA7 Thu 31 Jan 16:15 PA4 Sat 02 Feb 18:15 PA2

Bright Future A Fallible Girl – Conrad Clark Sun 27 Jan 19:00 PA2 Mon 28 Jan 13:00 PA4 Wed 30 Jan 16:00 PA4 Thu 31 Jan 20:00 CI5

INTERNATIONAL film festival rotterdam

Colofon Daily Tiger NL: Anton Damen (hoofdredactie), Kim van der Meulen (eindredactie), Joost Broeren, Paul van de Graaf, Sietse Meijer, Maricke Nieuwdorp, Nicole Santé, Veerle Snijders (redactie), Loes Evers, Rik Mertens, Pete Wu (web), Sanne de Rooij (marketing en communicatie), Marieke Berkhout (traffic) UK: Edward Lawrenson (editor-in-chief ), Nick Cunningham, Geoffrey MacNab, Mark Baker (editors), Ben Walters (web) Met medewerking van: Harriëtte Ubels Programmainformatie: Chris Schouten, Melissa van der Schoor Coördinatie A-Z: Saskia Gravelijn (tekst), Amanda Harput (beeld) Fotografie: Felix Kalkman, Bram Belloni, Corinne de Korver, Marije van Woerden, Ruud Jonkers, Nichon Glerum, Nadine Maas Vormgeving: Sjoukje van Gool, Laurenz van Galen, Gerald Zevenboom Drukker: Veenman+ Acquisitie: Daily Productions Oplage: 10.000 per dag, Volkskrantdag 12.000

Cloud mapping David Verbeek’s new film revolves around a young woman’s return to her home town. By Nick Cunningham

David Verbeek

photo: Felix Kalkman

David Verbeek’s Spectrum selection How to Describe a Cloud, that competes in the inaugural IFFR Big Screen Award Competition, is a film that pitches modernity against tradition, rural against urban, secularism against superstition. While the narrative endeavours to bridge the gaps between these polar points, we are left to ponder the meaning of a fantastical ending which offers hope and despair in equal measure. Liling is a young, beautiful, cosmopolitan musician living in Taipei, light years away from the unadorned coastal village of her upbringing. After she receives a call from her brother demanding she return home, she discovers that her dying mother has lost her sight and has begun to develop a sixth sense. Dismissive of such talk, Liling is nevertheless persuaded by her mother’s doctor to engage with her and to describe the world in order to protect the clarity of her mother’s memories. Little by little, Liling’s resistance to her mother’s reliance upon superstition is eroded. While her older friend Chen (a retired biologist, now a book illustrator) attempts to reinvigorate her diminishing secularism, he still feels compelled to design imaginary creatures that may have evolved on faraway planets. The film’s satisfying conclusion details first Chen and then Liling’s (is it imagined?) encounter with the product of his keen imagination. “The ending is not meant to be understood”, comments a busy Verbeek, who will pitch an 80%-financed project, Dead and Beautiful, at CineMart, and is continuing to raise finance on the 60%-financed Full Contact with producer Frans van Gestel (Topkapi Film) and whose Immortelle competes in Tiger Shorts. “In the film, there are a few moments that I’m most happy with, which were not in the script and were not a product of me figuring out how the plot should go. They are all the products of putting a few emotions together, sometimes discovering things while shooting but mostly making connections in the post-production that give rise to new interpretations that are not pre-conceived on paper.”

Spectrum How to Describe a Cloud – David Verbeek Sun 27 Jan 15:30 PA7 Mon 28 Jan 19:30 DJZ Tue 29 Jan 17:00 DJZ (press & industry) Thu 31 Jan 14:15 LV5

How to Describe a Cloud

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One such shot focusses on Liling and her mother asleep on a bed. When the blind woman opens her eyes we follow her unfocussed gaze through a dark tunnel and into the neon city at night. “What I like is that somehow those moments trigger a lot of possibilities and a lot of interpretations”, Verbeek says. “It’s impossible to put your finger on exactly what this means, but it only works if it is somehow in sync with the sensitivity of where this story is going. It is creating a moment that you can’t quite rationally explain – why is the movie is going there? – but it feels right, and those are the moments that through my career as a filmmaker I am looking for more and more, this kind of intuitive storytelling.” At another point in the film, Liling is temporarily unable to describe a cloud to her mother. Hence the film’s title? Actually, no. “The title pre-dated everything”, says Verbeek, and was one of the film’s essential building blocks. “I had two or three ideas – a blind mother, the loss of a daughter, a city and a landscape, and how to describe a cloud – the title was one of the first things”, he confirms.

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Press & Industry Screenings Sunday 27 January Cinerama 3

de Doelen Jurriaanse Zaal

•FLM•

09:15 Silent Ones [wp]

Ricky Rijneke, Netherlands/Hungary, 2013, DCP, 97 min, Hungarian, e.s.

A girl wakes up after a car crash. Her younger brother has disappeared. As she promised him, she boards a freighter to ﬁnd a new life. Then the shady Gábor crosses her path. Hallucinogenic, surrealist trip in the twilight zone between two worlds, debut by Dutch ﬁlmmaker. 11:15 Emperor Visits the Hell [ep]

•geel•

Li Luo, China/Canada, 2012, Video, 70 min, Mandarin, e.s.

Satire with a straight face. Free adaptation of chapters from Journey to the West, a novel from the Ming Dynasty moved to contemporary China with its gangsters, bureaucrats and rich ofﬁcials. Winner of the Dragons & Tigers Award in Vancouver. 13:00 De ontmaagding van Eva van End [ep]

Cinerama 4

•FLM•

09:00 Noche [wp]

Leonardo Brzezicki, Argentina, 2013, DCP, 85 min, Spanish, e.s.

The six friends of suicide victim Miguel gather to clear out his things, guess his motives and celebrate his life. Uneasy and sultry atmosphere in this psychological drama whose soundtrack surrealistically erases the boundaries between past and present. 11:00 36 [ep]

Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, Thailand, 2012, DCP, 68 min, Thai, e.s.

LantarenVenster 6

•FLM•

20:00 Misericordia: The Last Mystery of Kristo Vampiro [wp]

•geel•

Michiel ten Horn, Netherlands, 2012, DCP, 98 min, Dutch, e.s.

•paars02•

Verzamelprogramma, 85 min

•paars01•

Khavn De La Cruz, Philippines, 2013, DCP, 70 min, no dialogue, e.s.

Anyone lulled by Khavn’s strikingly accessible Mondomanila is in for a shock. The Filipino ﬁlm beast punishes his audience here again, just like old times. The form is powerful and avant-gardist and the subject is self-chastising. Incessantly. Khavn’s red period.

LantarenVenster 2

36 is the number of shots on an analogue roll of film. It’s also the 09:00 number of shots in this film. Yet The Island of it’s not a strict film, but the playful St. Matthews [wp] SP quest of a young photographer for the photos that disappeared on her Kevin Jerome Everson, USA, 2013, DCP, 70 min, English, e.s. computer: a whole year’s worth, Asked ‘where are the old photoincluding one of a challenging graphs?’ the filmmaker’s aunt encounter. replied, ‘we lost them in the flood.’ Everson records this loss of history 12:30 among the citizens of a rural riJirafas [wp] SP verside community in deep-South Enrique Álvarez, Cuba/Colombia/ Mississippi with the surety of an Panama, 2013, DCP, 94 min, insider. •FLM•

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Spanish/English, e.s.

Three young flatmates seek their When German exchange student footing in today’s Cuba, where you Veit (blond curls, blue eyes) comes must fight for a home of your own. to stay with teenager Eva (pussycat In a banal game of negotiation filsweater, glasses), his perfect looks led with sensual tension, Manuel, 10:00 awaken all kinds of things in her Lia and Tania join forces to survive. and in the rest of the dysfunctional Kayan [ep] BF family. Tragicomedy about growth Maryam Najafi, Lebanon/Canada, 2012, 16:00 pain, with a dash of ornithology Video, 86 min, Arabic/English/Farsi, e.s. and a lot of sausages. Watchtower [ep] TG Hanin is a divorced woman who runs a Lebanese restaurant in Pelin Esmer, Turkey/Germany/France, 15:15 2012, DCP, 96 min, Turkish, e.s. Vancouver. Her daughters, her Fat Shaker [ep] TG He hides from his own conscistaff and her love life all demand ence by fleeing into a remote attention, while she struggles to Mohammad Shirvani, Iran, 2013, watchtower. She flees her surrounkeep the restaurant in the black. DCP, 85 min, Farsi, e.s. dings in the basement of a rural An energetic and original look at Did you see the one with the fat bus station. Both have a secret that the Arab community in Canada. man and the leeches? I’d rather they can no longer hide when they not, some will say, but then they’ll meet each other. miss one of the most unusual films of the festival. By an Iranian artist who doesn’t like telling his dreams 18:00 and prefers to show them. Dreams GFP Bunny [ip] BF 09:30 that speak the truth. Tsuchiya Yutaka, Japan, 2012, Ziba [ep] BF Video, 82 min, Japanese, e.s. 17:15 Bani Khoshnoudi, Iran/France, A humorous film of a girl who Toegetakeld door 2012, DCP, 84 min, Farsi, e.s. poisons her mother - and also true de liefde [wp] Ziba is stuck, literally and meBF to life? In Japan, it’s possible. The taphorically. Her life is static and maker was a Tiger in Rotterdam in Ari Deelder, Netherlands, 2013, isolated. Stranded in surroundings 2004 and then went into hiding. DCP, 90 min, Dutch, e.s. strange to her, she waits for her Eight years later and more mature, Arie has writer’s block and thinks husband. While she waits, the he’s back. Not for viewers who he has found his muse in the beauoppression and paralysis of her can’t face vivisection. Microscope tiful tram driver Sonja. When her life become painfully tangible. on society. tram line is abolished, he feverishly The situation of one woman as a looks for her. While his fantasies metaphor for a country. 21:45 about Sonja become increasingly beautiful, Arie himself is having an Penumbra [wp] TG increasingly hard time.

LantarenVenster 3

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LantarenVenster 5

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Eduardo Villanueva, Mexico, 2013, DCP, 89 min, Spanish, e.s.

Portrait of a poor and aged couple waiting for death and ﬁlling time with the rituals of routine. Picturesque and realistic documentary, with a leading role for the wild Mexican countryside under the smoke of one of the most active volcanoes on the continent.

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10:00 DINAMO P&I Screenings 3 SH

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ADMISSION WITH P&I ACCREDITATION ONLY

DINAMO (Distribution Network of Artists’ Moving image Organizations) distributors show recently acquired work. These titles can also be seen in the festival video library. Bestaat uit:

The Big Scene

Tova Mozard, Sweden, 2011, DCP, 31 min, Swedish, e.s.

The artist Tova Mozard places herself, her mother and her grandmother on the main stage of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.

GFP Bunny

Suddenly, Last Summer [wp] Juha Mäki-Jussila, Finland, 2013, Video, 5 min, English

Experimental animation based on the play of the same name by Tennesee Williams. Fragments of the original are restaged by botanical performers. In Memoriam [wp]

Niina Suominen, Finland, 2013, Video, 7 min, Finnish, e.s.

A meditation on the temporary nature of human beings. The leading role is reserved for abandoned buildings and the spirits they house. Butterfly’s Effect [wp]

Anssi Kasitonni, Finland, 2013, Video, 9 min, no dialogue

Butterﬂy’s effect is chieﬂy a story about destiny or rather its absence.

Penumbra

Embarkation [wp]

Sini Pelkki, Finland, 2013, Video, 7 min, no dialogue

A moving image that is framed like a photograph explores the relationship between the still and the moving image. Small Heroes [wp]

Tommi Matikka, Senegal, 2013, Video, 2 min, no dialogue

Little superhero children are running and ﬂying over the rooftops of Dakar. Are we in a video game? Then when will it be GAME OVER? Jackson/Marker 4am [ep]

Ruth Beckermann, Austria, 2012, Video, 4 min, no dialogue

A night scene in Jackson, Mississippi: out on the street, an AfroAmerican dances to rap music that can be heard off camera.

Misericordia: The Last Mystery of Kristo Vampiro

Hotel Room

Bernd Oppl, Austria, 2011, Video, 6 min, no dialogue

A sheet of ice is gradually drawn over the room’s interior - almost indiscernibly. The camera´s zoom affords a view into the setting. Nachbehandlung

Edith Stauber, Austria, 2012, Video, 11 min, no dialogue

An everyday situation is transformed into a choreographed audiovisual mosaic, the portrait of a microcosm, a snapshot of life. Tic Tac

Josephine Ahnelt, Austria, 2011, 35mm, 3 min, no dialogue

When someone doing Parkour says Tic Tac, it means to push yourself from one object to overcome another instable or small object.

Kayan

The Island of St. Matthews

De ontmaagding van Eva van End

09:30

10.00

Kids Only

Big Boy Shireen Seno 10:00

10:00

Darvag Abolfazl Jalili

Sérgio Andrade

100’

99’

12.00 Goes Flying

various directors

12:00 Comrade Kim

12:30

81’

115’

15.00 Dan Sallitt

BF 98’

15:00

15:15

11:00

11.00

Li Luo

36 Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit

BF 86’

12.00

TG 68’

12:30

70’

11.00 12.00 11:15 Emperor Visits BF the Hell

84’

95’

13.00

14.00

94’

14:15

98’

104’

85’

90’

15.00

80’

137’

16:45

16.00 91’

16:15

17.00

Paradies: Glaube Ulrich Seidl 17:00

La tendresse Marion Hänsel

94’

97’

18:15

81’

19.00 93’

72’

20.00

Voice of Rotterdam

19:30

19:45

89’

85’

Our Nixon Penny Lane

104’

Our House

85’

136’

75’

17.00 17.00

TG 96’

68’

18:00

18.00

18.00 BF 97’

90’

19:00

19.00 19.00

20.00 20.00

Blancanieves Pablo Berger

19:30 Big Talk BF

81’

20:00

95’

90’

80’

21:00

21:45

22:00

22.00

Mater Dolorosa Adolfo B. Alix Jr.

22:15

The Complex Nakata Hideo TG

107’

96’

105’

79’

85’

106’

122’

101’

85’

24.00

105’

115’

88’

89’

24.00

106’

130’

90’

98’

90’

23.00

89’

23.00

94’

130’

86’

23.00

75’

94’

80’

Halley Sebastián Hofmann

Les chevaux de Dieu Nabil Ayouch

Rengaine Rachid Djaïdani 22:00

22:00

Il futuro Alicia Scherson

21:45

TG 87’

It Felt Like Love Eliza Hittman

Body

Der Felsen Dominik Graf

Eron Sheean

22:00 Errors of the Human

Parviz Majid Barzegar

21:45

Fine, Thanks Mátyás Prikler

Girls and Boys

22:15 TV Night: Girls,

89’

verzamelprogramma

Éden Bruno Safadi Mädchen

Dominik Graf

22:15 Das unsichtbare

Simon Killer Antonio Campos Willard

verzamelprogramma

22:15 Unveiling Avery

Together

verzamelprogramma

22:15 Short Stories: Pull

of Capitalism

Tony Conrad

Far Away verzamelprogramma

22.00

The Complex Nakata Hideo

22.00 22:15 124’ 21:45

Penumbra Eduardo Villanueva

21.00 BF

Wasteland Rowan Athale Kid Fien Troch

21:45

21.00

70’

22:15

El muerto y ser feliz Javier Rebollo

Fine, Thanks Mátyás Prikler

21:30

21:45

Daniel Hoesl

Jeannette

22:15 Soldate

Nordvest Michael Noer

118’

Misericordia SP Khavn De La Cruz

David Verbeek

19:30 How to Describe a Cloud 82’

No Pablo Larraín SP

It Felt Like Love Eliza Hittman

Dummy Jim Matt Hulse