daily tiger
42nd International Film Festival Rotterdam #6 Tuesday 29 January 2013 ZOZ voor Nederlandse editie
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(la tendresse / watchtower / dummy jim P5)
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Shorts Awarded. Last night, the winners of the three Canon Tiger Awards for Short Films 2013 were announced. They are The Tiger’s Mind by Beatrice Gibson (UK, 2012), Unsupported Transit by Zachary Formwalt (Netherlands, 2011) and Janus by Erik van Lieshout (Netherland, 2012). The IFFR short film nominee for the European Film Awards 2013 is Omar Robert Hamilton’s Though I Know the River is Dry (Egypt, 2013).
Janus
The Tiger’s Mind
CineMart in full swing: director Rosa Barba (right) discusses her Art:Film project Subconscious Society at one of the market’s one-to-one meetings.
photo: Nadine Maas
Unsupported Transit
Cross-platform traffic In its Changing Channels stand, IFFR explores the blurring boundaries between cinema, television and online by presenting episodic works made for television and the internet in a festival setting. By Ben Walters
As everyone knows, the days of hard and fast distinctions between cinema, television and online content are long gone. More and more movies are released on disc or streamed on demand after nominal or non-existent theatrical runs; increasing numbers of film auteurs are pouring their energies into prestige television projects and smart TV sets allow web content to be viewed on home set-ups that might rival the smallest multiplex screens for size and quality. Fertile fault lines
Changing Channels, a strand in IFFR 2013’s Signals section, offers a rich sample of material from the fertile fault lines of this changing landscape, concentrating on episodic work made for television and the internet. “We’re living in strange times”, notes Inge de Leeuw, who programmed the strand. “Divisions are not so strict anymore; directors can do what they want.” Based at Cinerama, and combining theatrical screenings and a web lounge, the Changing Channels programme largely falls into two categories: narratively complex TV miniseries made by established filmmakers, often balancing high production values with a downbeat tone; and web content created by young
directors with a scrappy, knockabout style and a contemporary social-satirical sensibility. The first group includes series like Agnieszka Holland’s Burning Bush, produced by HBO and set in the Czech Republic; Kore-eda Hirokazu’s 11-part Going Home; and Prófugos by Chile’s Pablo Larraín, whose feature No plays in this year’s Spectrum. “In previous years, we’ve seen a lot of American filmmakers making television, but I was keen to show how much is happening around the world”, says De Leeuw. Of course, such authored projects have existed before – think of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz or Von Trier’s The Kingdom. “European public broadcasters have been supportive in the past but, because of the economic crisis, it’s getting harder”, says De Leeuw. “Now it’s pay TV: Canal+ and HBO in Europe and Latin America. But production itself is quite quick, financially. And I think filmmakers are interested because of the storytelling possibilities: you can have more characters with complex storylines.” Close to home
When it comes to online content, the low-cost, low-risk basis of most productions makes the format especially appealing to young directors who can experiment with form on minimal budgets, but still potentially reach an audience via YouTube, Vimeo and the like. There’s an understandable tendency for such productions to look close to home for subject matter, telling stories about characters whose lives are often satirical takes on the storytellers’ own. Changing Channels offers a
chance to sample a broad swathe of Brooklyn-based parodies of young New York life, from Joe Swanberg’s Young American Bodies to Issa Rae’s The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. Lena Dunham’s HBO hit Girls also screens. An increasing number of young directors are shuttling between platforms. Ry Russo-Young has made serious-themed indie features such as Nobody Walks and You Won’t Miss Me, but has turned comedic for her three-part web series, Muscle Top, a tongue-in-cheek show about young queer musicians with a political edge, backed by New York magazine Paper. She approaches the different forms with different expectations. “When making features, I’m more inclined to let moments breathe,” Russo-Young notes, “whereas with anything else that I know will live online, I’m always looking to tighten because I assume the attention span of the viewer is different.” Experimentation
Mexico’s Sebastian Hofmann directed the feature Halley in the Hivos Tiger Awards Competition, but also has his web series Los micro burgueses, made several years ago with friends for practically no money, playing in Changing Channels. A sardonic satire of youth culture and bourgeois complacency, it also demonstrates the fascination with decaying bodies and existential ennui evident in Halley. “I ridicule myself and Mexican society in a very crude and stupid manner”, Hofmann says. “I’d been following some web series I really liked from the United States and Spain; I had the time and I had
INTERNATIONAL film festival rotterdam
some friends and we had a camera and a boom mic and we had fun and drugs. We just made it. It was just an experiment.” Accountability
Since then, Hofmann has become accustomed to working with bigger budgets and institutional backing – which brings levels of accountability the DIY web producer doesn’t have to deal with. “Money brings opportunities but also responsibility. It makes everything much more difficult, more bureaucratic. With Los micro burgueses, I could do and say whatever the fuck I want. Now I still do, but I have to get the signature, the stamp from above.” He still considers his web show to be apprentice work. “My first response when Inge asked to screen it was, ‘Rotterdam is such a prestigious festival, why would you want to show this crappy Mexican web show?’” Such deprecation is suggestive of the low status in which web work – even work as vibrant, funny and incisive as Los micro burgueses – is still held, even by those who make it. Such attitudes look certain to shift, however. Hofmann himself is working on a new web show (“it deals with existential issues and my fear of death, which is a recurring theme in my work”) and the mainstream industry is paying increasing attention: David Fincher’s political thriller House of Cards and the new cult sitcom series Arrested Development were produced as online-exclusive content for Netflix, while Bryan Singer’s H+ was made for YouTube. Strange days indeed.