DAILY TIGER
NEDERLANDSE EDITIE Z.O.Z
39TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM #2 FRIDAY 29 JANUARY 2010
photo: Ramon Mangold Park Chan-Ok (2nd from left), director of IFFR’s opening film Paju, is joined by the festival’s Managing Director Patrick van Mil (2nd from right) and Dutch Education, Culture and Science Minister Ronald Plasterk (right) at the opening of IFFR 2010 in De Doelen on Thursday night.
You the producer Cinema Reloaded is IFFR’s new initiative to use the web to raise finance and win audiences for cultural cinema. The experiment is bold but will it work, asks Nick Cunningham
An unprecedented number of first-time producers are setting their sights on the 2010 Rotterdam Film Festival. In fact, such are the expected levels of investment frenzy, this year’s event is likely to attract more first-time producers than just about any international film festival you care to mention. But few of these fledgling producers are professional, and their investments can only be measured in relatively modest terms: online coins valued at €5 each. Nevertheless, their involvement in the 2010 Cinema Reloaded experiment represents what IFFR chief Rutger Wolfson believes to be a revolutionary development in the funding of projects in the independent film sector. The festival has selected three directors to pitch a
short-film project online, at cinemareloaded.com. Alexis Dos Santos (Unmade Beds 2009, CineMart 2007) is web-pitching Another World: Rocky + Lulu (working title), a film about love and friendship in the virtual world. Ho Yuhang, whose short As I Lay Dying won a Tiger in 2008, is pitching an as-yet unnamed comic project about a group of radical Indonesians who wish to invade Malaysia, while the wildly idiosyncratic Pipilotti Rist (Pepperminta 2009, CineMart 2007) pitches her surrealist Liebling. The web audience is encouraged to invest in the projects by purchasing €5 coins, thereby becoming in effect co-producers on the film. When a project hits the €30,000 investment mark, it is ready to go into production. The budget can increase to a maximum of €60,000 per project, at which point no more investment in that particular project is possible. If a film fails to hit €30,000 its monies will be re-allocated to the leading film, as determined by investment to date. If no film reaches the minimum requirement, the donations made to the two lowest-yielding projects will be
transferred to the highest-yielding project. If that film subsequently fails to hit €30,000, gap financing will make up the shortfall. It is expected that one or more of the films will be screened at IFFR 2011. The running totals for each project are at cinemareloaded.com for all to see (and the Daily Tiger will also be featuring a daily update). Committed audience
“It is difficult for the type of films we love at this festival to always reach an audience”, Wolfson points out. “And at the same time, this means that the whole production, finance and distribution model is under a lot of stress. As a festival, we are were very well placed to do something about this problem practically, and not just to philosophise about it. We have a very large and committed audience, who I really believe is prepared to step in at the early stages of a film to help finance it. They are then more closely involved with the film than an audience would otherwise be, and for filmmakers it is a great opportunity to start
building an audience right from the beginning of a project. Rotterdam has a very long tradition of responding to developments in the industry, with initiatives such as CineMart and the Hubert Bals Fund. We try to support filmmakers and find ways to facilitate what they do. Cinema Reloaded seems like a logical progression of this into the digital era.” Another World producer Soledad concurs. “The first film we made together, Glue [2006], was partfinanced by grants received from Rotterdam”, she states. “Unmade Beds [2009] had been in development for four years when the money came through from Rotterdam. So the festival’s concept of Cinema Reloaded isn’t altogether alien to me, as the festival has played such an instrumental part in Alexis’ career.” Malaysian director Ho Yuhang expresses his gratitude to the festival in equally robust terms. “A bunch of strangers are giving me money – this is very exciting”, he exclaims. continues on page 3
sister act
continued from page 1 Internet casting
UK producer Rupert Preston sought to embrace and empower the web audience when he set up a partnership between MySpace and his company Vertigo Films to produce the £1 million-budgeted feature Faintheart (2008). The film’s finances were secured through conventional UK channels following the company’s high profile search for a director and cast from MySpace users: an exercise that garnered 1,000 showreels and over three million hits. After the film’s completion, 60 exclusive screenings arranged for MySpace devotees preceded a simultaneous DVD and VOD release. Preston explains, however, that the 14-month process was too protracted. Such projects, he argues, need to be vigorously compressed to retain a level of interest among the film’s potential internet audience. “Turning this interest into bums on seats means you have to shorten the whole process,” he comments. “On another of our productions, Outlaw by Nick Love, we went to Nick’s massive fan base through the web community and asked them to invest in the film in various ways, from being an extra to buying a t-shirt. That […] actually raised some money and it created huge awareness of the film before we even started shooting it. […] It is important to keep the momentum.” Experiment
Wolfson remains enthused by a model that favours more soberly-budgeted non-feature product. “I’m hoping that we’ll have at least one project funded,” he adds. “And if we see that there is enough enthusiasm to do it again in 2011 then we’ll do it. But, for sure, we want to share what we are doing with everybody who is interested. We’re not just going to present the Cinema Reloaded project itself during the festival. We’ll also have debates around the subject and publish articles about the experiment on our website, and hopefully during the year we’ll publish more to share what we have learned. Then in 2011 we will have a premiere of one or more of these projects with a roomful of the co-producers who made the films possible. That will be a lot of fun.” The state of play as of Thursday 28 January: PROJECT
PROJECT
PROJECT
1
2
3
€ 30.000
€ 30.000
€ 30.000
€ 2.300
€ 1.450
€ 1.295
Alexis Dos Santos
Pipilotti Rist
Ho Yuhang
BECOME A CO-PRODUCER
A Tokyo nun faces up to ageing in Tiger director Inoue Tsuki’s Autumn Adagio. She talks to Edward Lawrenson
As its title suggests, Autumn Adagio (Fuwaku no Adagio), the quietly compelling feature debut of Japanese director Inoue Tsuki, was shot during fall. The season is beautifully evoked by Tsuki, in extended, contemplative shots of her Tokyo exteriors, the trees a gorgeous blaze of autumnal browns and russet reds. It is through such leafy parks that her lead character, a forty-something Catholic nun called Sister Maria, is frequently found, lost in thought. Revolving around Maria’s troubled and confused emotions as she enters middle age, the movie is, Tsuki tells the Daily Tiger, “about facing and accepting aging”. The theme, she continues, matches the “beautiful and sad” feeling of autumn: “I couldn’t imagine filming in spring, summer or winter.” Following Maria’s encounters with three male strangers, the film charts her slow emergence from her hitherto cloistered life: playing the piano for a handsome ballet dancer at a local class marks a musical – and possibly sexual – awakening for the shy woman, while she embarks on a more dangerous path through her involvement with a young gardener grieving for his late mother. Maria is played with great stillness and subtlety by Rei Shibakusa, better known as a musician who has already acted in Tsuki’s long short The Woman Who is Beating the Earth (which showed at IFFR 2009). “She turned 40 last year”, Tsuki says, discussing her inspirations for the film. “She’s been living alone, but with her music. She is stoic, and I began to think of how I could use her way of being, and her beauty, for a movie.” Another trigger for the film came when Tsuki was in a crowded
Tokyo street: “I saw an old nun crossing the road. We rarely see nuns in Japan, and I was struck by her, as if she came from another place and time. I couldn’t get her out of my mind.” With many scenes marked by a static, long-take approach, the style is markedly more restrained than in The Woman Who is Beating the Earth. Using the prize money she won for that short at the Yubari film festival to finance Autumn Adagio, Tsuki explains the formal austerity on aesthetic rather than economic grounds: “It was important to shoot it in this dry and realistic way because the story is not melodramatic or fantastic. I wanted to depict a slice of life.” Nonetheless, the low budget made for a tough shoot. “The crew almost had no time even to eat”,
she recalls. Still, she took heart from the team spirit of her crew: “One day, it didn’t stop raining which meant we couldn’t continue shooting. So we all went to a café to wait for the bad weather to stop. When I found that all the crew were having a cup of tea, relaxing and having a pleasant chat together it gave me a huge relief. They were working so hard for me with few guarantees so I was feeling guilty. But when I saw them enjoying themselves, despite the difficulties of the shoot, I felt happy and positive about the film.” VPRO Tiger Awards Competition Autumn Adagio – Inoue Tsuki Fri 29 19:00 PA4, Sat 30 13:30 PA2, Sun 31 16:15 PA4, Tue 02 17:45 CI2 (Press & Industry), Fri 05 13:00 PA4
Blurring boundaries
Freedom and love are the themes of Tiger entrant Pedro González-Rubio’s new feature Alamar. By Ben Walters
Ask Pedro González-Rubio where reality in his new film ends and fiction begins and the director of Alamar – which depicts a five-year-old boy’s summer on the Mexican Caribbean coast with his fisherman father and grandfather and is one of this year’s Tiger contenders – grows coy. “It’s like asking a magician how he does his tricks!” González-Rubio’s previous feature, Toro Negro (IFFR 2006), which he co-directed with Carlos Armella, was a compelling documentary portrait of a charismatic, troubled young Mexican bullfighter. “Since Toro Negro dealt with frustration and hatred”, he says, “I wanted to flip the coin and portray freedom and love.” Alamar is indeed very different. In a prologue, we learn that Italian Roberta Palombini and Mexican Jorge Machado enjoyed several years of happiness, including the birth of their son Natan, before separating. Now she plans to relocate to Rome and Natan will spend a final summer with his father and grandfather, Nestór, on the coral reef of Banco
Chinchorro. Their time there is an idyll of swimming, building, fishing, playing and learning from and about nature; the film’s main impetus comes from the threat to Banco Chinchorro from increased urbanisation. “It’s about freedom”, González-Rubio says of the story. “It’s also about freedom in that it was a film I was able to do without having a crew of 20 or 100. It was just a friend of mine doing the sound and myself doing the camera. Like in Kerouac, what we show in the film is what I did with the characters. I slept the way they slept, in a hammock. I fished with them. I became part of the daily life and wrote it down with a camera.” And what about that line between fact and fiction? “The background story is the story of these people,” he says, “but the farewell trip is part of the fiction. I said, ‘Let’s suppose the mother is taking him to Italy’, so there was this feeling that they would be separated.”
he had met Nestór Marín and cast him as Jorge’s father. “I was captured by his personality and his hospitality. When I met him, he offered me some homemade tortilla. When I heard him laugh I knew I needed him.” The director then set parameters for the behaviour he would record. “I would plan what the activities would be and then they would develop them themselves naturally. Those situations are constructed, but the way they resolve them is documentary.” Such blurring of boundaries seems organic, even unavoidable to González-Rubio. “In fiction, you always manipulate”, he says. But even in documentary, “putting a camera in front of a person always manipulates their reality. It’s an impediment to letting reality shine. But this is my medium of expression. It’s the only way at this moment that I can see myself communicating my experiences and my story.”
Organic
VPRO Tiger Awards Competition Alamar – Pedro González-Rubio Fri 29 16:15 PA4, Sat 30 21:45 PA5, Sun 31 10:15 PA4, Mon 01 16:30 CI3 (Press & Industry), Sat 06 13:15 PA5
González-Rubio had met Jorge Machado when he was working as a birdwatching guide at a nature reserve. A month earlier, at Banco Chinchorro,
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Futureshock A major IFFR strand looks back on filmmakers’ reactions to technological change. It contains lessons for today’s directors, programmer Chinlin Hsieh tells Ben Walters
IFFR 2010 is looking to the future with Cinema Reloaded, its innovative experiment in online crowdsourced co-production, and Kino Climates, which Dial M for Murder
seeks to engage with how film content is consumed in today’s ever-diversifying cultural landscape. But the future has a past. The dozen films collected in the RE: Reloaded strand Back to the Future? reflect various occasions when the film industry has confronted major technological changes, ranging from Hitchcock’s dalliance with 3D in Dial M for Murder to the new Italian film Vedozero, shot by 70 teenagers with camera phones. “This isn’t the first time cinema has been challenged by new media”, says programmer Chinlin Hsieh. “We have a past to look into – there are patterns. Human beings are always human beings.” Titles illustrating this include Roger Corman’s The Raven, Yoshida Kiju’s Good for Nothing and Tsui Hark’s Dangerous Encounters: 1st Kind, pictures made when their respective American, Japanese and Hong Kong studios realised the need to shake up content to appeal to a new generation. (The Raven will be showing at a special drive-in theatre to emulate that once-novel mode of exhibition.) The possibilities and anxieties associated with video are expressed through Godard’s Numero Deux and Cronenberg’s Videodrome. And the digital experiments of Mike Figgis’s Timecode and Michael Almereyda’s Another Girl, Another Planet – shot on the children’s-toy format PixelVision – foreshadow today’s virtual filmworld. PRESCIENT
Perpetuating Success By Nick Cunningham
The Netherlands Association of Dutch Film Distributors (NVF) and the Netherlands Association of Cinema Owners (NVB) have agreed to up their annual investment in the Dutch industry to a cool €2.5 million, roughly two thirds of which will be earmarked specifically for film production. This extra investment, agreed with Dutch Education, Culture and Science Minister Ronald Plasterk on 11 January and to be administered by the newly-established Abraham Tuschinski Fund Foundation (ATF), marks an approximate 150% increase on previous investment within the local industry. The agreement is backdated to 1 January 2009 and acknowledges the lower 6% rate of VAT applicable to Dutch cinema tickets, introduced to stimulate attendances. The ATF has allocated €675,000 from 2009 coffers to the Netherlands Film Fund for exhibition and distribution support, with specific emphasis placed on the distribution of smaller artistic films, NVF chairman Wilco Wolfers told the Daily Tiger. A further €500,000 has been earmarked for the fledgling eye institute. The 2009 production investment pot, valued at €1,325,000, will reward Dutch producers whose films perform with distinction at the local box office. “If picture X reaches a certain amount of admissions, it will receive a bonus of Y, which must be invested in the producer’s next film”, commented Wolfers. “We don’t decide if it will be used for script development or whatever, but the principle is to create a perpetual motion of success. The idea is that successful producers will continue to produce successful films. With this additional money, I represent a huge market share and a growing market for local films. Our aim is to increase that, but not through supporting films from any one genre. We only look at admissions, and the important thing is that this should lead to more admissions for local films in Holland.”
Hsieh, who also produces films in Paris and has worked in distribution, notes that past experience should teach us to be cautious as well as enthusiastic, even while embracing experiments such as Cinema Reloaded. “It’s exciting, but it’s not yet a business model. When looking to find a way out for arthouse distribution, we also need to seize every opportunity that comes along, but we need to be prudent.” Back to the Future? is ultimately about money as much as anything. “The programme is about history, but it’s also about the industry,” Hsieh says. “It wouldn’t make sense to choose films that tell us nothing about economics.” The ‘50s 3D boom is a case in point. “Dial M For Murder was shot in 3D in just a few months,” Hsieh says, “but by the time they were finished the hype was over, so it was released in 2D.” By screening the film stereoscopically at IFFR, in other words, the festival offers audiences a chance to view the picture in a way its original audience never could. “Now everybody’s saying 3D is the future again, but it depends on so many factors – technology, economics, artists’ engagement.” Other work, made with little money and no hype, has proven unexpectedly prescient. “Another Girl, Another Planet is a very creative approach, not just formally but economically”, Hsieh notes. “I wanted something to represent the ‘90s. When you think of DV, you think of The Blair Witch Project or Dogme 95, but I wanted to show something that was not
Chinlin Hsieh
photo: Ruud Jonkers
such an obvious choice. Michael Almereyda had to make the film without finance, but it eventually made it to international distribution. PixelVision did not become a trend or change the face of filmmaking, but it was a signal of how quickly we were building to DV, which did change the face of the world.” Timecode is another example of a film that couldn’t have been made without the unique properties of a new format. “It could not have been made on 35mm – they required four non-stop 90-minute takes, and they did it 15 times!” Change
What connects most of the films in the strand is their willingness to embrace novel opportunities opened up by new technologies rather than trying to use them to imitate older, more conventional
forms. “My ultimate message to filmmakers is that what really counts is creativity, not just in terms of the subject matter you use but also about how you go about it”, Hsieh says. “You might love the grain of film, but if you can’t use 35mm, or even 16mm, look at other options, rather than kill your project. You have stepped into a domain of art where you have to be economically alert. You cannot make a film with a piece of paper and a few colours.” In other words, she adds, it’s in filmmakers’ interests when confronting major shifts in the media landscape to be “very cinephilic and very practical”: qualities, needless to say, that IFFR has long promoted. “New technology always appears to be threatening, but change is just a fact. You try to take advantage of it or you decide that you’re a victim and suffer.”
Visit gets vital New York-based sales outfit Visit Films has confirmed its acquisition of two Rotterdam titles: Sophie Deraspe’s Tiger contender Les signes vitaux (Vital Signs) and Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (screening in the Spectrum section). Alongside the pair of new pick-ups, Visit Films is already handling sales on another Rotterdam title, Shirley Adams, directed by Oliver Hermanus and screening in Bright Futures. The Montreal-set Les signes vitaux is Sophie Deraspe’s second feature after Missing Victor Pellerin (2006). It is about Simone, a woman who has been drifting through life without direction. Following the death of her grandmother, she begins to tend for the dying. The film stars Montreal-based dancer and artist Marie-Hélène Bellavance. It was produced through Montreal-based outfit Siamese Films. Trash Humpers, a recent and controversial winner of the Grand Jury prize at CPH:Dox, is the latest feature from regular Rotterdam attendee, Harmony Korine. It’s a mock-documentary, shot verité style, about a gang of elderly vandals who wreak havoc, breaking into properties, smashing glass and humping trash. GM
Trash Humpers
Filmmakers arriving at IFFR today include Michael Almereyda, Jim Jennings, Kore-Eda Hirokazu, Luc Moullet, György Pálfi, Simon Rumley, Sai Yoichi, Nicolas Winding Refn
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Calling all Filmmakers
On Empathy Olaf Möller, film critic and programmer of IFFR strand After Victory, looks forward to Peter Schreiner‘s Totó
When Blaue Ferne (1994) was shown at IFFR back then, Peter Schreiner, its director, entered some venue after a screening to find it – empty – everybody had gone, God knows where and when. Schreiner was crushed: for him, cinema was always a way out of his sense of isolation. And now this. He suffered a serious spiritual crisis, sold all of his equipment, started to work with and for the church: that seemed like a more sensible way towards man, others. When he got back to cinema, his works became meditations, soulscapes, essays in empathy: How close can you get to another human being? Who is this Totó we meet in his film of the same name (screening at IFFR 2010)? Who are these soldiers walking into the Finnish poetess’s living room, who are these children who murder their friend, in Algeria, during the war? One of us gets visited by the spectres – so of flesh and bone – of a crime she never heard of. Eija-Liisa Ahtila wonders in Missä on missä (2009) about the limits of empathy, gets riled up about a church that seems to have lost its sense of Evil, and therewith Goodness. If history can materialise itself in one’s home over decades and thousands of miles, time and space, then there truly is no suffering alien, as the great Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov once said apropos the Vietnam War. What do the words, the memories of survivors tell, convey to us of their sorrows and pains? What connection can be there between the people reading testimonies by people who lived through the Siege of Leningrad and the authors of these humble lines? What limits have to be transcended in Aleksandr Sokurov’s oratorylike Citaem blokadnuju knigu (2009) to reach a common humanity? How much empathy is left in each of us; how much will to strive for it? ^
Totó – Peter Schreiner Fri 29 22:15 CI3, Sat 30 14:30 CI6, Wed 03 12:00 WBZ (Press & Industy) Fri 05 11:30 VE3, Sat 06 10:00 CI4
The Film Office staff (from left to right): Mary Davies, Lerato Phiri, Nikolas Montaldi, Rik Vermeulen, Hayet Benkara, Thomas Crommentuyn, Dana Duyn, Jannie Langbroek, Jolinde den Haas
Film Office staff are on standby at the Sales and Industry Club on the fourth floor of De Doelen to both help attending filmmakers promote their films as effectively as possible, and help them forge alliances with professionals from the international production, sales and finance sectors. The Film Office also represents the first point of contact for the Press & Industry Screenings and the Video Library. This afternoon at 17.30, the Club will host a ‘How to
HBF and CineMart’ presentation, while tomorrow at 11am a selection of festival professionals and specialists will advise delegates during the ‘Make the Most of A Film Festival’ session. “We help filmmakers meet and connect with guests from the film industry and build new networks”, commented the Film Office’s Jolinde den Haas yesterday. “Filmmakers just starting out can expect help and advice on how to develop their careers in the film busi-
photo: Corinne de Korver
ness. As in previous years, we will continue the individual consultancy meetings with an expanded team of industry pros, but this year also present panels with international guests from the film festival world and experts in conversation dealing with sales and production.” NC For more events and panels, see http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/professionals/film-office/
Frontline reporting Andrei Nekrasov’s docmentary on the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia has already caused controversy in his native Russia. The filmmaker is used to this. By Geoffrey Macnab
Outspoken Russian director Andrei Nekrasov has dismissed charges in the Russian media that he is anti-Russian. Speaking to the Daily Tiger from Sundance (where his new film Russian Lessons screened earlier this week), Nekrasov said he considered himself “a Russian patriot.” The St. Petersburg-based director also revealed that, since he made the film, he has been receiving threatening emails. There have also been hostile articles about him on Russian websites. The director has been accused of being a traitor to his country and a “Russophobe.” Last year, his house in Finland was vandalized and burgled in mysterious circumstances. At the same time as being vilified in Russia, Nekrasov has become a near national hero in Georgia, where he recently won a “Person Of The Year” award. Nekrasov co-directed Russian Lessons with Olga Konskaya (who died of cancer last May, at the age of 44, before the film was completed.) The documentary (a European premiere in IFFR’s Spectrum) explores the causes of the war between Russia and Georgia in August of 2008. It questions the officialRussian account of the war – an account that has been accepted by many in the Western media. The second half of the film looks at the media manipulation and propaganda that accompanied the war. “Unless you talk honestly, Russia will continue to
decay”, the filmmaker stated of his film’s trenchant analysis of Russian imperialism. He said that incidents such as the Russian invasion of Georgia “reinforce those who I think are damaging Russia… the people who only care about their own power.” The director said that he hoped Russian Lessons would show audiences what Georgia was really like. “We wanted people to get to know Georgia and to convey what we feel: which is that they [the Georgian people] are very generous and tolerant. They are not aggressive.” When Nekrasov was growing up in Soviet-era Rus-
sia, Georgia was regarded with huge affection by Russians. “The Georgians were like the Italians of the Soviet Union, with joie de vivre. Everybody loved them.” Dissenting voices
The director argued that the difference between the Russians and the Georgians is that the Georgians “do accept [an] opposite point of view.” Many Georgians have criticised their own government’s handling of the war and have drawn attention to acts of aggression committed by their country in
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South Ossetia in the 1990s. Nekrasov argues that the freedom of speech there is in Georgia simply doesn’t exist in Russia. He also said that all his own painstaking research pointed to Russian aggression. Nekrasov’s recent documentaries have been fiercely critical of human rights abuses and political skulduggery in contemporary Russia. Disbelief accused the Russian government of being behind the terrorist bombings in Russia in 1999, Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case explored the circumstances leading up to the murder of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. Nekrasov and Konskaya were both on the frontline during the conflict. “The war was in the air. Everybody was talking about it. Now, it is presented to the international community by Russia as an unwarranted, sudden, unexpected and insidious attack by Georgia. It was nothing of the kind”, Nekrasov observed of the prelude to the war. Early in his career, Nekrasov was an assistant on The Sacrifice, the final film by Andrei Tarkovsky. On the face of it, there is a huge gulf between Tarkovsky’s spiritual approach to filmmaking and the polemical documentaries that Nekrasov is making today. However, the director argues that Tarkovsky’s cinema was dissident in its own way too. “As a very young man, I wanted to be a poet like Tarkovsky”, Nekrasov says, adding: “somebody of Tarkovsky’s temperament, had he lived today, would maybe have acted like me… if you look deeper into his work and train of thought, you realise he was a dissenter.” Russian Lessons – Andrei Nekrasov Sun 31 19:00 PA5, Mon 01 18:15 VE4 (Press & Industry) Thu 04 09:45 CI7, Fri 05 12:00 CI 5
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More content It’s over 30 years now since Keith Griffiths produced Chris Petit’s cult film Radio On (1979), one of the few ‘road movies’ in British film history. Now, Petit’s new road movie, Content, is a world premiere in Rotterdam’s Spectrum. Geoffrey Macnab reports
Griffiths is again the producer. No, he says, Petit’s latest film shouldn’t be seen as a direct follow-up to its celebrated predecessor, which was co-produced by Wim Wenders. “Chris sees it more as a coda to Radio On: ambient rather than narrative”, Griffiths muses, adding that the technology and the way Petit makes his films have changed dramatically since the late 1970s. Rotterdam audiences, Griffiths suggests, have always been open to “the rather bold, ascetic, essay form” of Petit’s recent film work, much of which has been seen at the Festival. Here in Rotterdam, the prolific Griffiths, who runs Illuminations Films with ex-IFFR boss Simon Field, has many other projects to pitch and discuss with potential partners. Griffiths is partnering with Peter Strickland, the award-winning director of Katalin Varga, on his new Italian-set horror film, Berberian Sound Studio. This is about an unassuming sound engineer from Dorking Deepdene, England, who ends up working in a sleazy Italian post-synch film sound studio around 1970. The conceit is that we never actually see the grisly horror film he is working on... we only hear it. The project has already received development funding from the UK Film Council. Griffiths is starting to draw together co-production finance, and hopes that the film will begin shooting by the end of the year. The dialogue is in Italian and in English. Positive
Another Griffiths-produced film, Robinson In Ruins (Patrick Keiller’s follow-up to his two celebrated 1990s films London and Robinson In Space) will be ready by the summer. Also due to be delivered this
Content
summer (and a likely candidate for Cannes) is Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s On Uncle Boonmee: A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Griffiths is collaborating again with the Quay brothers on their new Bruno Schulz feature adaptation, Sanatorium Under The Hour Glass, a feature combining live action and animation that will shoot in Poland in late 2010 or early 2011. Meanwhile, Griffiths is an executive producer on Simon Pummell’s multi-platform CineMart project Brand New-U (which is being produced through Ja-
nine Marmot’s Hot Property Films). He is also execproducing Patience, a new “essay film” about revered German writer W.G. Sebald, the author of Austerlitz, who died in 2001, being put together by Grant Gee and Gareth Evans. “The man, history, memory and utopia” is how Griffiths sums up the project. Challenging
These may be tough times for many UK producers but Griffiths, who has “30 years of contacts”, consistently manages to put challenging new work
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into production. He is optimistic, too, about future prospects. Public funding body the UK Film Council is in the midst of an overhaul that will see its three current production funds merged into one. He is full of praise for the UKFC’s current development fund under Tanya Seghatchian (“she and her team have absolutely turned their way of working around”). “Potentially, providing the UK Film Council pick the right people to lead the Fund, I am quite encouraged”, Griffiths reflects. “I am very positive... but if none of that team get the jobs, I am not so sure!”