DAILY TIGER
40TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM #5 MONDAY 31 JANUARy 2011
Twenty years of Tiger tales: Sandra den Hamer, Simon Field, Marco Müller, Rutger Wolfson and Emile Fallaux
NEDERLANDSE EDITIE Z.O.Z
photo: Ruud Jonkers
Rotterdam Reunion Four former IFFR directors were in town this weekend for the premiere of Frank Scheffer’s documentary Tiger Eyes, celebrating IFFR’s 40th anniversary. They talk to Geoffrey Macnab about their time at the helm of the festival. When did you first visit the Festival? Emile Fallaux (1992-1996): In the 70s, during the period of Hubert Bals (the IFFR’s founding director). It was in a small venue that has disappeared, the old Lantaren Venster. People were like sardines in a can. It was a bit of an in-crowd, but very joyful and adventurous. People had the advantage that they belonged to the happy few watching foreign films no other Dutch person would see. Now, of course, that has completely changed. When I took over, attendance was something like 125,000. When I left, it was about 325,000. Sandra Den Hamer (2000-2007): At the beginning of the 80s. I was still a student. I came as a visitor. I think it was the very last year the festival took place in Lantaren Venster. It was very crowded. People couldn’t move. There were queues waiting to get into that small cinema while people still had to get out. And how did you start working at the festival? SDH: I was an intern manager for Holland Film, organizing the Dutch presence in Berlin and Cannes. When I was in Cannes representing Dutch films, [film critic] Peter Van Bueren said to him [Bals], ‘You should talk to that girl. Perhaps she can work with you.’ For the first and possibly last time in his life – Bals was known for not liking Dutch films – he entered the Dutch stand. He said ‘I need to get to know you.’ Marco Müller (1990-1991): Hubert had died a few months before. There had been a transition edition. Anne [Head] had put together a programme [in 1989] more or less according to Huub’s guidelines. The Board was looking for people who could continue in the very same direction, but with their own personality.
Simon Field (1996-2004): There was a team from the festival who came to the ICA [where Field was Director of Cinema] to discuss whether I would like to consider applying for the post of festival director. Felix Rottenberg was then Chairman of the IFFR Board. He was a very energetic and persuasive figure. I couldn’t make up my mind. Then someone said to me, ‘I hear you turned down the Rotterdam job.’ That made think about it and eventually I took the job. How do you remember Huub Bals? MM: If I could use a stupid line from an old Nokia ad, I would say he was the perfect person to connect people – to connect film people and art people and to make sure that by this connection, things would happen. SF: I never met Hubert Bals. One of the things I had to come to terms with when I came here – and that was perhaps more disconcerting than I expected – was that the shadow of Huub Bals was still felt enormously over the festival. You were inevitably compared with Huub. How were CineMart and the Hubert Bals Fund founded? SDH: The year before Bals died, we had the idea for what is now the Hubert Bals Fund. He became a little depressed in the last years of his life, because he lost a distribution arm. In the early days, the Festival was both a festival and a distribution company. He bought films. But his eyes were bigger than his money allowed. The distribution arm went bankrupt, and then it was split up. There was a foundation for the festival and the distribution went over to the Filmmuseum. He was just running the festival and he was never happy with that, because when he was buying films, he could give money to filmmakers. That’s why he started the idea of supporting filmmakers in the early stages of production. MM: I invented what is now called CineMart. I invented the idea that you should have a gigantic workshop where filmmakers would find the right kind of potential partners. That was the embryo of what then became CineMart. Huub Bals would invite the filmmaker
who still had his dream project locked in a drawer. He would ask him to unlock that drawer, take the project out and give a presentation. My slogan for my two years in Rotterdam was: ‘forward in a 360-degree direction.’ There was no fence erected between high and low, art cinema and very peculiar commercial cinema. What do you think was your biggest achievement in your time at Rotterdam? EF: The way we opened up the festival to a larger audience without compromising quality and adventure. The fact that the main pillars of the festival are still here. They seem to have been good choices, like The Tiger Awards. It was a big break from Rotterdam’s non-competitive 70s tradition. We accommodated the wishes mostly of Asian filmmakers, who could not get the help of their national film authorities to bring their films to a festival that didn’t have a competition. Another reason was that we found small films didn’t get Dutch publicity. The Dutch press focused on the films that had been in Cannes. We started the Tiger competition to try to shift this attention. SF: There are certain elements of the programme that I look back on with great satisfaction – the introduction or the continuing in a different format of the Filmmakers in Focus … obviously Catherine Breillat is one example, and Fukasaku Kinji – people you could put a spotlight on. And I suppose what was most distinctive in my regime was the way we built the Exploding Cinema and immediately began to have collaborations with museums and galleries. MM: I was so excited, you could test new ways of not just running a festival but also disrupting a big film event. I was keen to follow in Huub’s footsteps and not only create what is now the CineMart but also create the Hubert Bals Fund. I had to insist that we would now have an important number of world premieres. I felt that you needed to attract media attention. We needed to have enough material to ensure critics and journalists would be here for at least a week, if not more.
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SDH: My speciality has always been to be very involved in CineMart and the Hubert Bals Fund – to make the festival more than a showcase for cinema, but also to be involved in stimulating the production and distribution of film. CineMart was the very first coproduction market in the world. What does it feel like coming back to the festival? EF: There is always a nostalgia for when I was here, working 24 hours a day. After 15 years, you feel a little bit of an outsider, but that’s a personal thing. This year, I’ve tremendously enjoyed the way Rutger has expanded the ‘cinema without walls’ idea that we started in the early 90s, breaking out of the cinemas to have this cinematic experience linked up with other art disciplines in other locations – galleries, shops even. SDH: When I was working in Rotterdam, I always longed for the days I could come just as a visitor. My secret wish was to be a jury member – just to sit in the cinema and look at films. This year, that dream has come true. Marco, why did you only spend two years at the Festival? MM: It takes a lot of energy for somebody who belongs to a southern European culture to come to terms with a northern European culture. I felt it was difficult to defend my own version of creative energy – my Latin version of creative fantasy. I was very surprised when I finally landed in Rotterdam today, because it was a sunny day. I think that over those two years, I had 10 days of sun! For somebody who was born and grew up in Italy, that was certainly a problem. Is there anything the festival could or should do to change? SDH: The festival has always been changing. It is still changing and anticipating … in the new days of crowd funding, the Festival is again the first to research the possibilities to finance films through the internet and online distribution. That’s very smart. The spirit of change and development is still there.