DAILY TIGER
40TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM #4 SUNDAY 30 JANUARy 2011
CineMart’s winning team: Jacobine van der Vloed, Nienke Poelsma, Loes Knape, Fay Breeman, Marit van den Elshout
NEDERLANDSE EDITIE Z.O.Z
photo: Nadine Maas
Market force CineMart director Marit van den Elshout tells Nick Cunningham why the event is such a natural part of IFFR.
The 28th CineMart opens its doors for business this morning, offering 33 projects to leading international independent finance and co-production professionals, and a plethora of panels and discussions to enable trade participants to make sense of the evolving production and distribution landscapes. Established luminaries of European cinema such as Alex van Warmerdam and Jan Svankmajer will pitch their new projects, rubbing shoulders with the likes of feature debutant newcomer Visra Vichit-Vadakan from Thailand, who is pitching her Karma Police. Projects from prolific, awardwinning companies such as Leipzig-based ma.je. de and Austria’s Amour Fou Filmproduktion will be available for professional perusal, and budgets this year range from the low (€450,000 for the Swedish/Danish co-pro K.R.E.V?!) to – at least in CineMart terms – the high (€6 million plus for the Luxembourg/Austrian/Belgium project The Night of a Thousand Hours).
them to us because of the platform we can give them. We want to stay true to the filmmakers we admire.” Many projects pitched at previous CineMarts have graced leading international festivals over the past 12 months. These include the 2010 Cannes competition title Certified Copy by Abbas Kiarostami (CineMart 2008), Un homme qui crie (MahamatSaleh Haroun, CineMart 2007), The Housemaid (Im Sang-Soo, CineMart 2009) and My Joy by Sergei Loznitsa (CineMart 2007). Many other CineMart titles screened at festivals like Venice, Toronto and Locarno, as well across all other Cannes 2010 sections. This year sees the inaugural Eurimages Co-production Award, valued at €30,000 and to be given to the development of a project with the best European co-pro potential. Other 2011 innovations include the market’s collaboration with Festival Scope, the online film-viewing portal for professionals, to present the back catalogue of all CineMart filmmakers to potential funders prior to festival kickoff. The service will extended after Rotterdam to enable sales agents and distributors to view the 2011 Tiger selection, subject to producer approval.
Platform
Think-tank
“There is an even more curated selection of projects this year,” CineMart director Marit van den Elshout observes. “There is always a pressure to look at the relevance of what we are doing, but I think that the good service we offer is underlined by the projects that we receive and the top independent filmmakers, such as Mantarraya and Svankmajer, who send
Three think-tank power lunches have been organised to assess key industry topics: the true value of public and regional funding, how a film’s distribution strategy can be aided by proper understanding of the festival/press/sales axis, and a comparative analysis of the approaches to transmedia and traditional production. Van den Elshout reserves
a special mention for the digital distribution and VOD panels she has organised for this year’s Rotterdam Lab participants and the active consultancy on transmedia offered this year to CineMart producers by filmmaker and transmedia guru Anita Ondine. She is keen to stress, nevertheless, that all of these activities are organized specifically within a festival context. “There is a lot happening at CineMart, and everybody knows what the issues are to do with independent cinema at the moment, so we also want to encourage people to see films as well, and not just sit on panels.” KEY PLAYERS
Independent multi-award-winning filmmakers Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth are back at CineMart this year, pitching The Fifth Season. “We make films for universal audiences, and even niche audiences,” comments Brosens, whose previous CineMart pitches include Khadak, which won the Lion of the Future prize at Venice 2006, and Altiplano, which premiered at Cannes Critics Week in 2009. “We find it very important to launch internationally once a project is in a mature state, and of all the different places – Cannes or Berlin or otherwise – for us, Rotterdam is really the best, because it is so organised, people are so accessible, and all the key players are there. Making films is not just about signing contracts, it’s about building up relationships and maintaining relationships. That’s what the CineMart is so brilliant at.” Dutch producer Marc van Warmerdam, who is in Rotterdam this year to pitch his brother Alex’s
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Camille Borgman, concurs. “As soon as we are in the CineMart, the film exists, not just for us but for everybody else,” he says. “Then, because it exists, it is much easier for me to talk about the project, to deal with the project, to try to involve people in the project. If it exists it will be made. Every film we have pitched at CineMart has been made.” Van Warmerdam credits the CineMart for his company Graniet’s collaboration with firm co-pro partner La Parti Production (Belgium) with whom the Van Warmerdams have worked on their last two films, The Last Days of Emma Blank (2009) and Waiter (2007), both CineMart projects. “Our relationship with La Parti was a direct result of the CineMart,” he stresses. Director-driven
Van den Elshout stresses the factors that she believes have contributed to CineMart’s continuing high status among the myriad co-production events available to independent filmmakers. “I think this is because we are not so much producer-led as directordriven, more so than most other markets,” she says. “Even though we have many international partners, we can really curate the selection. We are not bound by festival restrictions, whereas other markets may take their lead more from their host festival. CineMart is a natural part of the Rotterdam Film Festival. It is not an add-on. People come to Rotterdam for this. We try to get the best people to work with us, the best services and the best location. This is why we have a high success rate for films that come back, go to other festivals and win prizes, find distribution deals and recoup.”
Cinema Reloaded titles launch Today, Rotterdam’s first two Cinema Reloaded films, directed by Alexis Dos Santos and Ho Yuhang, receive their world premieres in front of a festival audience including many of the coproducers who helped finance them. Geoffrey Macnab reports.
Cinema Reloaded is the groundbreaking crowdfunding scheme launched amid much fanfare at IFFR last year. The idea is that Rotterdam will help filmmakers connect with audiences around the world in order to finance and distribute their projects. Both the Dos Santos project, Random Strangers, and Ho Yuhang’s No One Is Illegal, have budgets of €15,000. In the end, a relatively small part of that came through the “co-producers.” Random Strangers raised €4,400 through the crowd-funding initiative, while No One Is Illegal raised €2,560. The rest of the budgets were covered through a private funder, whose identity the festival is not revealing. What is clear, though, is that Cinema Reloaded has been a rewarding and illuminating experiment, even if the overall fund-raising drive hasn’t matched original expectations. “It is really nice that these films are finished. We will have 150 of the co-producers here,” says IFFR director Rutger Wolfson. “It will be quite a unique occasion to have a premiere of the film and there aren’t just one or two producers, but it’s like the whole audience is the producer!” Dialogue
Cinema Reloaded has also facilitated a very lively dialogue between the two filmmakers and their small army of co-producers/followers. There were around 500 “co-producers” in all, investing an average of about €30 each. “That’s what we always thought would be the key,” Wolfson suggests of the
Random Strangers
filmmaker/producer relationship. “You’re a fan of the filmmaker and you would like to know more. That really works.” Many invested anonymously, thereby denying themselves a shot at cinematic glory through being listed on the credits. The filmmakers themselves seem to have enjoyed their exchanges with their coproducers. Alexis Dos Santos has been living in Amsterdam in recent months. Whenever he goes to a party, he invariably meets strangers who tell him, “Oh, I am one of the coproducers of your film.” Random Strangers is about two people on opposite sides of the globe who enter a relationship in a virtual world. The director posted frequent updates for his co-producers. “I got some encouraging comments,” he remembers. At one stage, when he needed videos of people chatting in front of webcams, he asked his co-producers to help. Several sent him videos of themselves.
Ho Yuhang’s film, in which the filmmaker tracks down Indonesians who want to destroy Malaysia, was eventually made as a documentary. “It is something that went off course a little bit,” the director reflects on a project originally envisaged as fiction. RESHAPING
The co-producers didn’t interfere with the film, but were always ready to help when needed. “I didn’t want to disappoint them, even those who funded me with the minimum amount, which is €5”, says Ho. Over the course of the year, two filmmakers dropped out of Cinema Reloaded because of competing commitments – first, Swiss director Pipilotti Rist and then US director Harmony Korine. The festival is now in the debriefing phase. Why didn’t more people buy coins? How should the initiative now evolve? “Primarily, it may not pique the interest of the general public enough yet, but that can change,” says Ho. “If it was a very commercial filmmaker, Michael Bay say, you’d get millions of people generating these funds. That’s the other extreme.” “We’re thinking about reshaping the platform a little bit and offering it to filmmakers who can’t fall back on traditional funding structures”, Wolfson says. One idea is to work with African filmmakers who don’t have traditional funding bodies to support them. The IFFR is also keen to bring another partner on board, so that more time and effort can be given to running the scheme. PARTNERSHIP
The Reloaded venture comes at a time when the festival is placing more and more emphasis on financing from private sources. Earlier this week, IFFR announced its new partnership with The Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds on the Tiger Film Mecenaat (Tiger Film Patrons’ Fund). Patrons investing a minimum of €300 per annum into the Fund over a period of five years will access a 50%
No One Is Illegal
Van Heijningen responds to Rotterdam Media Fund closure Jacques van Heijningen, head of the Rotterdam Media Fund, that will close its doors in 2012, talks to Nick Cunningham about his disappointment at the City Council’s decision to pull future funding for the organisation.
“I was very sad,” he comments. “The local Rotterdam government has to cut its budget by €20 million in four years. That means that they had to make a lot of decisions, and one of the decisions was to cut the budget of the Rotterdam Media Fund. I told the local mayor and alderman that we will go back to the starting point in the mid-1990s, when there was no money for the media industries. All that we have built in the last 15 years will be pulled down in half a year. The media industry is totally dependant on government subsidies.”
In 2009, Van Heijningen had funds of €3.1 million at his disposal. This was cut to €2.4 million in 2010, and that figure was halved to €1.2 million in 2011. A City Council contribution of €300,000 at the end of 2010 raised this figure to €1.5 million, but as of 1 January 2012 there will be no more funds available. This fact was confirmed on Friday by a Council spokesperson. “It’s a matter of cutbacks,” she said. “We had to make decisions – this was a painful one. We made other painful decisions, for instance the zoo in Rotterdam. There were many cutbacks of things that we were proud of in Rotterdam, but it was necessary.” Van Heijningen counters: “If you want to have a media interest in your city this will always cost money. Rotterdam is not the cultural head city. If you want that, you must build it and find your own way. That’s what happened over the last 15 years.
Rotterdam built its own media sector, its own industry, its own quality. Rotterdam was on the map, with the film commission and the Fund. Now it is broken down.” The City Council spokesperson revealed however that the local authority is engaged in “dialogue” with the media sector as a whole to determine “what the future will bring”. She refused to confirm if there were any specific plans to replace the Fund, or the levels, if any, of future investment in the Rotterdam audiovisual sector, but nevertheless she sounded a note of optimism. “We are looking now at the sector, how the policy will be for the years ahead, to keep it alive … It’s really a matter of looking for opportunities, talking to the companies that are working in that sector. There are no fundamental plans that are already outlined.”
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tax break. “The audience of the festival is a great resource for us,” Festival director Rutger Wolfson says. “Filmmakers really like our audience and the audience really likes the festival. There is a very mutual relationship … we see that we will have to rely more on our audience to support us and to be able develop in the future.” Wolfson argues that the response to the Patrons’ Fund will indicate just how ready festival-goers really are to underwrite the Festival. “The level of success of this Fund will say something about the realistic possibilities of patronage. The government is saying culture consumers should pay for culture. This will be a test of how realistic that is. If we can’t do it, it will be very hard for smaller events to do it.”
Cross picked up Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross (a European premiere in IFFR’s Spectrum) has been snapped up for Benelux distribution by Arnhem-based arthouse outfit, Contact Films. The Mill and the Cross, starring Charlotte Rampling, Michael York and Rutger Hauer, is inspired by Pieter Breugel’s painting Christ Carrying the Cross. The deal, concluded earlier this month, was confirmed by the film’s French sales agent, Wide Management. Contact Films has also pre-bought another title with strong Rotterdam links, The Silent Ones. The film, the debut feature of young Dutch director Ricky Rijneke, was presented at CineMart last year. Currently in post-production, the film stars Orsi Tóth (Lourdes, Women Without Men, Delta). One point of interest is that the film has two DoPs: Gergely Pohárnok (who shot Taxidermia and Hukkle) and Jean-Paul de Zaeytijd (who shot Eldorado and Ultranova). It’s about two youngsters from Eastern Europe in search of a better life. The deal with Contact Films was confirmed by Rotterdam Films, the production company formed by Dirk Rijneke and Mildred van Leeuwaarden. As acquisition activity on Rotterdam titles mounts, French sales company Coach 14 has swooped to take world rights on Matthew Petock’s A Little Closer. The US film (a world premiere in Bright Future) follows three family members as each learn the cruelties of love and sexuality. The cast is headlined by Sayra Player, Parker Lutz and Eric Baskerville. Geoffrey Macnab
The Mill and the Cross
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Growing pains Tiger competitor Majid Barzegar discusses the challenges of independent production in Iran with Edward Lawrenson.
The Baron
BLOODLESS COUP Edgar Pera says his new feature is like Dracula without the blood. By Ben Walters.
Based on a 1942 story by Branquinho da Fonseca, Portuguese director Edgar Pera’s The Baron (which receives its world premiere at IFFR today) sees a school inspector from a Kafkaesque milieu travelling to a small village dominated by a tyrannical local aristocrat who makes him an offer of hospitality he can’t refuse. Pera shot the unfolding tale in a heightened, stylised manner reminiscent of classic Universal horror as well as German expressionism, Bresson and other canonical registers. Anchored by a magnetic title performance from Nuno Melo, it is also reminiscent of Guy Maddin. “It’s about power and how that relates to basic relationships,” Pera says. “How the baron treats women, for example. He’s like a vampire, so I took that image and made him a Dracula without blood.” Despite the tone of homage, however, Pera didn’t have individual reference points. “The film is a screen for the cinephilia of the spectator – even if I didn’t try to emulate specific films, people with knowledge would see the connections.” Despite wide experience in documentaries and shorts, this is only Pera’s second feature; his
first was based on another story by da Fonseca, prompting the writer of The Baron’s screenplay to approach him for this project. The film bills itself as a reconstruction of a wartime adaptation of the story destroyed by the Fascist regime. In fact, Pera says, the suppressed production “really happened in theatre. But people would be surprised if I told them The Baron hadn’t been filmed before, and you can certainly speculate. It’s in the nature of dictatorship that many things that happened are simply lost.” Shot in 35 days with a small crew, it was a lowbudget production with one major asset. “The big difference was that I had a crane, which I’d never had before,” says Pera. “I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, like a nouveau riche. I just wanted the camera to float. In the credits, the crane operator is credited as ‘Vampire Camera’.” Pera shot on Super16. “I like the feel of film. In the lab, they wanted to take out all the scratches. I said: ‘What are you doing?! We paid a lot for that!’”
“I wanted to make a film about adolescence and that stage when you turn into an adult”, says Iranian director Majid Barzegar about the inspiration behind his Tiger entrant, Rainy Seasons. From this broad idea, Barzegar has fashioned a resonant and delicate portrait of the frustrations of teenage life that revolves around 16-year-old Sina (Navid Layeghi Moghadam). Left alone in his Tehran apartment by his parents, who are in the midst of divorcing one another, Sina forms a close bond with a female student, while fending off the threats of a small-time drug dealer, to whom he owes money. Shot in quietly virtuoso long-takes, the film boasts an impressive central turn from Moghadam. “Hamed Rajabi and I wrote the role first,” says Barzegar, “and then we set about finding someone to play him from a field of around 500 people. It was open casting, but at the same time I was actively looking for a lead actor, at the film schools
The Baron – Edgar Pera
Sun 30 17:00 CI1 Mon 31 13:45 CI2 Press & Industry Tue 01 19:45 CI7 Fri 04 18:45 PA5
Rainy Seasons
and ordinary high schools. We took pictures of the candidates, and from this I narrowed them down to ten, whom I tested in person.” “When you work with actors,” Barzegar says about Iranian cinema’s prevailing neo-realist tendency, “it’s quite common in Iran to take the actor to the location and have them act how he or she likes.” His film was different: “We had two months of intensive rehearsal, partly because of lack of time and budget – we had to shoot fast.” Having previously directed shorts and documentaries, Barzegar raised the budget from the private sector. “We had everything at our disposal, but the budget was limited.” One challenge in raising the budget was Barzeger’s suspicion that the film would struggle to get permission from the Iranian authorities to screen. In fact, although the final version has written approval to be seen, no Iranian cinema will screen the film – partly, Barzegar says, because the scenes in which Sina and the girl are alone in the apartment are deemed offensive. “It’s frustrating,” Barzeger says, “and the only good news is we have permission to screen it at international festivals – hence, we’re here.” Such remarks acquire a grave relevance given the recent arrest of Barzeger’s fellow Iranian directors Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof – in fact Barzeger is speaking on the same floor as IFFR’s photo-booth, which allows visitors to register their protest against Panahi and Rasoulof’s conviction. Panahi is a friend of Barzeger, and he speaks warmly about his colleague: “Panahi is an extraordinary filmmaker, he says: “I can tell you, the space dedicated to his international awards in the Iranian museum of cinema is bigger than my house! I’m not afraid to say I’m against his conviction and I truly hope he gets to make his new film.” Rainy Seasons – Majid Barzegar Sun 30 09:30 DJZ Press & Industry Sun 30 15:30 PA7 Mon 31 13:15 PA6 Wed 02 13:30 PA4 Sat 05 22:15 PA6
Gift of the world Tiger competitor Elisa Miller explains how an impulsive decision to go to Buenos Aires with a camera led to her impressive feature debut. By Edward Lawrenson.
“The crew was basically my actress, my DoP and me,” says Mexican director Elisa Miller of her beguiling feature debut Vete más lejos, Alicia. Following 19-year-old Alicia (Sofia Espinosa) as she leaves her family home in Mexico to travel in Argentina, the film is a haunting, intimately observed portrait of a young adult finding her feet in a foreign land, filmed with freewheeling visual lyricism and shot through with a melancholy delicacy. The idea for the film partly grew out of Miller’s close relationship with her actress. “I’d worked with Sofia on my short Ver llover,” says Miller. “We went to a lot of festivals together, so we got to know one another really well. She was 17 when we were travelling, and she was asking me lots of questions: we shared a lot of strange, personal details about the kind of loneliness and alienation you feel at that age. She was on the brink of going to Buenos Aires to study, and I said, ‘OK, wherever you go, I’ll come with you with a camera, and we’ll do something around the kind of things we talked about when we were travelling’.” “I was struggling to write a script for another project [with Hubert Bals support],” says Miller, “so I thought I should just go to Buenos Aires with a camera and meet Sofia.” At the same time, Miller arranged for her DoP, María José Secco, to join them in the Argentine city. “We’d been emailing one another ideas,” she says of preparation with Secco (who shot last year’s Tiger winner Agua fría de mar). “It was like preproduction by email.” Filming for a month without a conventional script
of dreamy happenstance, as in the moment when Miller’s camera picks out specks of dust in Alicia’s room, lit up by a shaft of sunlight. “Our idea was using the gifts of the world,” says Miller, on her more spontaneous, responsive shooting style. “It might sound a bit corny, but it’s close to my personal way of looking at the world, trying to grab those gifts.” Having filmed for a month, Miller returned to Mexico with around 30 hours of footage (not 300, as stated in the IFFR catalogue, she politely points out, adding, “We’d never have finished editing if that was the case!”) In fact the post production, which saw the budget rise to around $100,000, took some four months, including a sound mix that, Miller says, was crucial to the feel of the film. “I did the sound recording myself, which was a mistake,” laughs Miller, “because we ended up with not-sogood sound.” She continues: “We got really lucky because I screened a rough cut to friends in Mexico and they urged me to meet this guy who does big, big, Hollywood-style movies: I was kind of embarrassed showing him my film, but he said, ‘I’ll do it,’ and we had a great time in the mixing.” Having secured a sales agent, Paris-based Funny Balloons, the film screens tonight for the first time outside of Mexico; a prospect Miller admits to being nervous about. “I’m always shy about my work,” she says, “I haven’t got over that yet. Maybe I should start!”
Vete más lejos, Alicia
(on a budget of around $10,000), Miller admits her on-the-hoof, improvisational approach was “scary”. “Half of the time I was paralyzed and people were asking, ‘What are we doing here?’ – and I didn’t know!” She credits Secco as a reassuring influence: “We’re like sisters,” she said, “I’m the crazy one, and she’s so cool.” “I’d never been to that part of Argentina before,” Miller says of the area in southern Argentina where
she filmed: “My Argentine friends were asking how could I make a film without knowing the country, but that’s exactly my point; I wanted to see things through the eyes of a foreigner.” The results are frequently visually impressive. Shot on HDV and Super-8, the film combines breathtaking shots of the surrounding landscape – especially a snow-covered glacier that Alicia travels to towards the end of the picture – with small moments
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Vete más lejos, Alicia – Elisa Miller Sun 30 16:30 PA4 Mon 31 13:30 PA4 Tue 01 14:00 DJZ Press & Industry Wed 02 19:30 PA4 Press & Industry Thu 03 12:00 DJZ Sat 05 19:15 PA3
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CELLULOID DREAMS American film artist Nathaniel Dorsky talks to Ben Walters about the healing power of film.
Nathaniel Dorsky isn’t always present when his films are shown, but he likes to be: “I look at it a little like being a musician, and a projection is a live performance”, says Dorsky after the first screening in a Signals strand devoted to the unique American film artist’s work, which in its rhythms, cycles and purity does indeed have a musical quality – despite the fact that none of his films has a soundtrack. This gives screenings an almost religious quality; Dorsky is also the author of a book titled Devotional Cinema. Little surprise that IFFR programmer Erwin van ’t Hart describes the “horizontally programmed” Dorsky strand – work shows at 4pm every afternoon in the LantarenVenster – as “an oasis within this hectic festival”. Dorksy will also be present at today’s and tomorrow’s events. Dorsky began experimenting with film in the 1960s, but found his stride in the 1980s and 1990s and is still producing new work. Collected by major art institutions from MoMA to the Pompidou, Dorsky’s 16mm films combine lyricism, formalism and other avant-garde approaches with his own unique sensibility. They range from 10 to 45 minutes and layer images in sequences of short, meditative shots, some of objects and people, others more abstract.
dream, not to represent some external reality; to progress through its own associations for its own needs”. Dorsky accrues such material organically rather than programmatically. “I shoot for a while and collect for a while and I trust that there’s a certain continuity because I’m the one filming it,” he says. He captures moments of surprising intimacy in public places. Eventually, editing starts. “At some point, you select an entry point, a doorway, and see where the film goes from there.” Variations
Marrow
At Thursday’s programme, Dorsky introduced Pneuma (1983), Variations (1998) and Love’s Refrain (2001). Following the death of his father and other traumas, Dorsky had a “dark period” lasting six or seven years. He didn’t enjoy much in life but still wanted to make films. His previously preferred Kodachrome seemed “too joyful and generous”, so he experimented with various stocks and reversal formats, which were often available cheaply. “One day, I was so down I couldn’t even finish shooting the roll, so I shot half of it and had it processed,” he recalls. “The only part that interested me was the part without any images on it” – developed raw stock that seemed to express “the very marrow of film”. Processing labs were nonplussed (“You’d always get a note back saying ‘I’m sorry, there are no images on your film’”), but he realised “it was the very essence of film that was the thing that healed me. That essence was touching an essence in me. So the film that came out of it was quite joyful.” Organic
Love’s Refrain
Variations and Love’s Refrain are from a cycle of four ‘cinematic songs’ composed after another troubled period. After sustaining head injuries in a car crash, Dorsky “couldn’t enjoy speaking or listening to speech for some years. The only thing I could enjoy was walking with my camera and
Weight
Pneuma
taking pictures.” Once he returned to filmmaking, formalist avant-garde approaches “felt deeply horrible – almost nauseating”. He instead concentrated on images ranging from nature to people to abstract patterns that offered heart and beauty – “the reasons I first started making films” – and sought ways to express the idea of “cinema as a self-existing place”, wanting “to allow film itself to
Dorsky only allows his work to be projected in cinemas. DVDs hold no appeal. “They don’t work,” he says. “DVD is basically an audio medium on which images rest. These films are about weight, and electronic media have no weight. It’s like if you see a painting and you fall in love with it, then you think you’ll see if they have a postcard and it has none of what you fell in love with. It’s like the difference between fresh orange juice and orange soda.
Remembering Rotterdam As part of our commemorative coverage of the IFFR’s fortieth anniversary, producer Philippe Avril shares his most vivid memories of the event.
For me, Rotterdam will always be associated with Vimukthi Jayasundara’s The Forsaken Land, which I produced. The project was selected at CineMart in 2004, and we won the Prince Claus Award with it – it was absolutely fantastic. And we had a great meeting with Michel Reilhac from Arte France Cinema, who was very enthusiastic about the project. I can’t think of many occasions when a firsttime feature filmmaker from Sri Lanka like Vimukthi would received such incredible support; it was wonderful to see that happen to a filmmaker you believe in, who just had a couple of shorts behind him. And this was just the beginning of the story: The Forsaken Land won the Camera d’or in 2005, and we came back to Rotterdam in 2006 with the film. It was a marvelous moment, because when Vimukthi and I entered the screening room, we saw so many people there, there was not a free seat in the house. You have an extraordinary audience in Rotterdam: the other screenings were exactly the same. It was an unbelievable welcome, allowing a young filmmaker from Sri Lanka to be discovered and recognised. The audiences here are really committed and supportive. If you celebrate Rotterdam, then you have to celebrate the audience.