Daily Tiger UK #10

DAILY TIGER

NEDERLANDSE EDITIE Z.O.Z

39TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM #10 SATURDAY 6 FEBRUARy 2010

Team photo: before the awards ceremony last night, there was just time for a goup photo of (most of the) VPRO Tiger Awards directors/producers. Back row, left to right: Pedro GonzalezRubio, Martijn Maria Smits, Sophie Deraspe, Sophie Letourneur, Yelena & Nikolay Renard, Ben Russell, Levan Koguashvili, Yang Heng, Paz Fábrega, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Charlotte Lay Kuen Lim, Inoue Tsuki, Tsubota Yoshifumi and Katrin Kissa

Not alone IFFR director Rutger Wolfson reflects on a wonderful festival, and looks forward to showcasing the Tiger films in New York. Geoffrey Macnab reports

“We are not alone!” Swiss filmmaker and artist Pipilotti Rist encouraged a packed audience to shriek out at the top of its lungs during a talk in Rotterdam earlier this week. Festival director Rutger Wolfson, looking back on the 39th International Film Festival Rotterdam, cites Rist’s situationist exercise in audience manipulation as one of his highlights of this year’s event. Rist’s phrase “we are not alone” could stand as the motto for the festival itself as it enters its final weekend. Solidarity has been the watchword as filmmakers, film-goers and industry delegates have congregated in Rotterdam in their usual vast numbers for a festival celebrating cinema at its most innovative.

Interaction

EXPERIMENT

“It’s really nice to see that so many films I really like are getting such a good response,” Wolfson says.

“For me personally, it has been wonderful. I have just floated along on a very nice level of enthusiasm and adrenalin.” Brandishing a “hand-crafted” poster given to him by artist/filmmaker Cameron Jamie, the Rotterdam boss enthuses about IFFR’s Kino Climates sidebar. He is equally upbeat about the 3D screening of Dial M For Murder in the Back To The Future section and about the many top-notch international auteurs (François Ozon, Harmony Korine, to name but two) who’ve been in town, throwing themselves into the festival’s extracurricular activities. Whether it has been Tsai Ming-liang’s coffee beans (a hot seller at the Break Even Store) or Korine and Jamie’s public appearances, the interaction between filmmakers and public has been warm and enthusiastic throughout the festival. Wolfson makes a convincing case that 2010 really has seen the festival “reloaded.”

The Cinema Reloaded initiative, which encourages festival-goers to “become a producer” by buying coins to invest in three new shorts, at least one of which is to be shown at next year’s event, has made a promising start. Wolfson acknowledged that the three projects have not yet attracted quite as much financing from festival-goers as was hoped. “Of course, we didn’t know how it would work. It’s the first time we have done something like this. It’s really an experiment,” Wolfson reflects. “We noticed, with industry people and also with audiences, that it wasn’t really visible yet at the beginning of the Festival. We have been communicating a lot about it, but it has to sink in with people I guess.”

Africa

The second half of this year’s festival saw the launch of Where Is Africa/Forget Africa. “The initial response has been very positive,” Wolfson says of a programme that is still very much underway. The

festival will be looking to strengthen yet further its ties with Africa. “It’s clear that we now have a more in-depth knowledge and have made some good contacts. The Hubert Bals Fund is also very much interested in African countries, and in how to develop a film culture there. What we need to do is look at which new steps we can take… We’ve started something, and we can build from that.”

Fond Farewell

IFFR’s Managing Director Patrick van Mil is shortly to depart from the festival and join the Stedelijk Museum, in mid-March. “On a more personal note, I am very sorry to see him leave. We get along very well and he is really exceptionally good at what he does. I am sorry to see him go but I understand… The Stedelijk Museum is the most important museum we have in Holland, apart from the Rijksmuseum, perhaps. It’s a fantastic recognition of his talents.”

Continues on page 3

Continued from page 1 Audience

Audience figures appear to be holding up, albeit there are fewer venues this year. “We have a good feeling about it,” Wolfson said, although precise statistics won’t be available for a few more days. One constant debate throughout the festival has been about the state of arthouse distribution. Many have noted that the films Rotterdam screens are struggling more and more to make headway in the marketplace. During the Festival, though, this work has kept cinemas packed – a sign that there audiences are there if the work is presented in the right way.

Profile

Wolfson insists that Rotterdam’s relevance for the industry is undiminished. “We have a very, very clear profile. Industry people know that, if they have a special kind of film that is adventurous or innovative, Rotterdam is a really good place to launch it, either in CineMart or when it is finished as a premiere,” Wolfson states.

New York

In March, the Rotterdam boss will be off to New York for the IFFR showcase at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Most of the Tigers will be screening. “I think it will be a good moment for the Festival. For American film industry people who went to Sundance or Berlin or didn’t have time to see the Rotterdam selection, they can now see it.”

With the end of the Festival in sight, Wolfson is now beginning to turn his attention toward domestic tasks. As the father of young children, the IFFR boss isn’t likely to have much down time. What does next week have in store? “To do all the household chores. I am sure that my wife has made a list of broken stuff in my house!”

The Flying Dutchwoman WWII continues to be a staple topic for Dutch filmmakers, but in her IFFR closer The Aviatrix of Kazbek, Ineke Smits subverts the form with a fantastical depiction of a true wartime story, she tells Nick Cunningham

The Aviatrix of Kazbek (De Vliegenierster van Kazbek), which world premieres at IFFR, tells the story of a revolt on the Dutch island of Texel, when Georgian soldiers turned on their German ‘allies’: an exercise that resulted in the deaths of over a thousand troops and civilians. It is also a love story, told mainly through the eyes of Marie, a teenage girl blossoming into full womanhood, who continually allows her dreams and imagination to carry her away on romantic flights of fancy. “I am a very romantic person,” Ineke Smits explains. “I make romantic movies, which are very unfashionable, but what can I do?”

Trapped in a dour Protestant household and engaged to the unimaginative Paul, Marie’s life is transformed when a small contingent of exotic Georgians are billeted in her father’s barn. A romantic link is soon formed between her and one of the soldiers, Goga, and the inevitable charges of collaboration are brought by the locals, before Marie chooses to play a decisive role in the Georgian revolt.

“I didn’t want to make a historical reconstruction – that would have been really easy,” comments Smits, who invests her film with an audacious vibrancy and careless disregard for the conventions of the war genre. Instead, the tumultuous psychological changes Marie undergoes are depicted with a magical realist verve that allows butterflies to burst from tree trunks and the mountains of Kazbek to float on cumulus clouds. The aviatrix of Marie’s imagination appears in a sumptuously-choreographed dance routine in the Georgian mountains.

The Aviatrix of Kazbek

“My films, even my documentaries, always deal with the power of imagination, and how wonderful it is that we human beings have the ability to fantasise and to dream,” Smits explains. “Imagination is a tool that enables us to survive or to deal with reality. I realise that there are certain things, thematically or visually, consciously or unconsciously, that I always do. It was pointed out to me the other day during a TV interview how shadows reappear in my films, quite often a different shape from the bodies that produce them. I do that in this film too.

The more films you make, the clearer it becomes what you are after. I am not one of those directors who never look at the their films again. I study meticulously what I have done and draw lessons from it. My old films remind me of where I have come from and how I have developed.”

Smits explains how her main characters are painted meticulously, her ancillary characters with broader brush strokes. It is a style, she argues, that enables her more easily to present national characteristics within a story of such enormous national

consequence. “I find that the Dutch in general are quite scared,” she observes. “They don’t want to do things that will affect the future. We’re a nation of cold winters when there is no food growing, so we keep our potatoes for the next day, whereas in the film the Georgians say ‘why spoil your drunkenness tonight with the thought of a hangover tomorrow?’ The way I constructed the characters was liking throwing a stone into a pond. The first ring is the main characters, real people with real feelings.

The outer rings take on more the characteristics of these cultural groups rather than specific personalities.”

The film is book-ended with contemporary scenes in the Caucasian mountains which hint at a pleasingly romantic outcome, and the philosophical framework of the film is is expressed in the repeated refrain: “That’s where the danger is, just where you think everything is beautiful.”

The Aviatrix of Kazbek – Ineke Smits

Sat 06 21:00 DOG

Skeletons

Out of the closet The idea behind off-beat comedy Skeletons kept director Nick Whitfield awake at night. By Edward Lawrenson

It was while lying in his bed one sleepless night that writer-director Nick Whitfield got the idea for what would become his debut feature. I thought “OK, two men walk across a field, arrive at some strangers’ house, and take the skeletons out of the peoples’ closet, disclose the details, then they leave again.”

This is the basic premise for Whitfield’s comedy drama Skeletons, which received its world premiere this week at IFFR. Andrew Buckley and Ed Gaughan play two exorcists – a couple of Laurel and Hardy figures in crumpled suits who walk from house to house across a rural North of England landscape. Accessing significant moments from the home owners’

troubled pasts through sprightly flashback sequences, Buckley and Guaghan’s psychic investigators report back on these to their clients as their working relationship comes under strain from the job.

Before the feature, however, Whitfield turned his idea into a short: “I was writing scripts that weren’t getting made and I was desperate to make a film, so I made that idea into a short. My wife played a part, and my mate also played a part. It cost £500, on train fares and food and hiring a HD camera for two days.”

He continues: “It got a good response from people at EM Media, and a year later when I was at the Edinburgh Film Festival, people from the UK Film Council were saying they liked it, even though it hadn’t had any official screenings. I guess it made an impression: it was quite unusual and particular.”

Having made this short, Whitfield still felt he hadn’t fully explored the full potential of the idea: “I really liked the actors and the characters so I made another short with them called Rebecca in order to test them in a different way. I knew they were funny, but if they were to sustain a feature we were going to have to test them emotionally, to start to look at some of the themes of Skeletons the feature.”

Developed by EM Media, the screen agency supporting film culture in the UK’s East Midlands, the movie was shot in the Peak District, the area where Shane Meadows filmed Dead Man’s Shoes. The tight budget meant “we didn’t have any time to do it wrong: we had to do it right all the time,” but Whitfield credits the contribution of his DoP and production designer for an efficient shoot. “I was determined it was going to be fun,” says Whitfield of the shoot. “At the end

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of week one we’d shot 198 slates. We always finished on time – which itself is an achievement on a lowbudget shoot – and at the end of the night I asked if we could do two cutaways to make it to 200; and everyone said ‘of course’. It was hard, but there was just a really good feeling on set.”

Back in his home in the Peak District, Whitfield is reflecting on the “warm response” IFFR audiences have given Skeletons and “acclimatizing” to normal life after the intensity of the festival. Given the subject of his film – which came to him during a sleepless night – does Whitfield have his own skeletons in the closet? “If I did, I certainly wouldn’t share them with you,” he says.

Skeletons – Nick Whitfield

Sat 06 16:00 PA5

3

On to phase two With the final days of IFFR 2010 marking the end of Cinema Reloaded Phase One, the hard work now begins on driving finances towards the €30,000 greenlight. Nick Cunningham sampled opnion from around the festival on the groundbreaking project

Festival director Rutger Wolfson insisted that Rotterdam’s commitment to Cinema Reloaded is long-haul. “We might have to reshape it a little, but that is the whole point of it,” he said, adding that the initiative was an experiment for the festival as well as for filmmakers and audiences. “We have to think of what would be a good next step to ensure that it works… There are two sides to it. There is the side of really doing it and doing something practical, and there is the side of putting something on the agenda. The second part is fine. The first part? We need to look at it and see where we take it from here.”

Producer and festival programmer Madeleine Molyneaux (Montreal Festival of New Cinema) can see a similar application across the Atlantic.

“If it were to be done in Montreal, you could target unsung heroes in local communities in Montreal and Quebec or longtime alumni of the festival who are there all the time but need to scrape together financing,” she commented. “There is something to be said for balancing well-known names and entities and then starting to incorporate folks that

aren’t so well-known. People will be turned on and it will be the equivalent of search engines like Amazon that say if you like this, buy this. If you like to invest in Pipilotti Rist you may wish to invest in so-and-so. That means the unknown filmmakers could ride the coat-tails of the more well-known, so you’d have this diverse funding model.”

Not surprisingly, the filmmakers themselves seemed a little unnerved by the responsibility of having a couple of hundred production virgins in on the professional process. “The thought of people giving money from their pockets makes me feel a little ill,” pointed out Alexis Dos Santos (project: Another World: Rocky + Lulu). “I have an extra responsibility to all these people. Usually, you have one financier and their money is for making films and not for anything else, but this is like buying a cinema ticket in advance.”

Pipilotti Rist (Liebling) put a series of questions she hopes to see answered over the next year. “How much control can a financier or producer have over the film’s outcome?” she asked. “To get money for a feature, I had to write a script for the juries of public and private funds. Producer Hugofilm was in charge of finding finance. With Pepperminta, the producer and me worked three or four years for free. If I produce videos for an installation […]

I am free to change my ideas anytime. If I do now make a short, financed and produced by the audience, when and how do I report the process? I am

And the winners are...

This year’s three VPRO Tiger Awards winners, selected from the fifteen films in the competition, were announced last night at the awards ceremony in the Oude Luxor Theater. The winning films show a broad geographical spread, with two of the three having received support from IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund.

The jury, made up of French actress and singer Jeanne Balibar (star of Ne change rien), PolishDutch filmmaker Úrszula Antoniak (Nothing Personal), former director of the Singapore Film Festival Philip Cheah, Mexican filmmaker (and jury chair) Amat Escalante (Sangre, Los bastardos and attending CineMart with his project Heli) and Ugandan actor and activist Okello Kelo Sam, awarded the three prizes, worth €15,000 each, to: Agua fría de mar (Cold Water of the Sea) by Paz Fá-

Agua fría de mar

brega, Mundane History ( Jao nok krajok) by Anocha Suwichakornpong and Alamar (To the Sea) by Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio. Last Wednesday, Anocha Suwichakornpong was also awarded the Prince Claus Fund Film Grant (also worth €15,000) for her CineMart project By the Time It Gets Dark.

Other awards presented included the NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) Award, which went to Moscow (Yang han-mari, yang doo-mari) by South Korean Whang CheolMean, the FIPRESCI (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique) Award, granted to Let Each One Go Where He May by Ben Russell (USA, Suriname).

The Association of Dutch film critics (KNF) presented its KNF Award to Norteado (Northless) by Rigoberto Perezcano of Mexico.

Rutger Wolfson, Pipilotti Rist and Alexis Dos Santos

very much looking forward to being an active part of this experiment.”

Ho Yuhang, whose project still remains unnamed, expressed his ongoing satisfaction with the process. “The Rotterdam experience has always been nice, and is extra nice this year with the Cinema Reloaded project,” he enthused. “It’s still very fresh

photo: Corinne de Korver

for me. I wake up every morning and there is something new. The festival has given me inspiration how to continue with this thing and how to continue to generate interest later. So far it has been great. When I get back to Malaysia, I will communicate my thoughts with Rotterdam to see what we can do next.”

Write stuff Every year, IFFR offers six young critics the chance to hone their craft at the festival. Edward Lawrenson talks to the 2010 pack

Now in its thirteenth year, the IFFR Trainee Project for Young Film Critics is an access-all-areas opportunity for six under-30-year-old journalists from outside the Netherlands to experience and write about an international film festival like Rotterdam.

It’s yet to be seen how the half-dozen critics chosen this year will capitalize on their involvement (although past alumni include now-established film writers such as Gavin Smith, now editor of Film Comment and Dennis Lim who writes for the New York Times). One thing is clear, however: the six trainees are already behaving like hardened hacks. There’s much spiky wisecracking among the group; especially impressive given that for the majority of the young critics, English is their second language. Their lively comments are lubricated by a pack of beers project host Gert-Jan Bleeker has provided for the session with the Daily Tiger. The beer loosens a few of the reservations expressed about a Tiger photo shoot: “We are usually behind the camera, writing about it,” says Romanian trainee Mirauna Vasilescu.

Group portrait taken, the trainees settle down to talk about why they applied for the project. The IFFR’s international emphasis was a key factor for many. “I did a similar scheme at the Warsaw film festival,” explains Polish trainee Ola Salwa, “but this was a chance to do something outside of Poland.” Buenos Aires-based Javier Alcácer Mackinlay agrees: “I’ve never been to Europe before; com-

ing to a big international festival like this was a way of doing that.”

But the scheme has also prompted the trainees to think carefully about the objectives underpinning their profession. “I wanted to find out the main purposes of film criticism,” says South Africa-based writer Espera Donouvossi. “I was interested in finding out the differences between film criticism and film theory,” adds Bryan Hartzhein, from the USA. To that end, their programme of activities includes sessions with established critics like Screen International’s Howard Feinstein and the Filmkrant’s Dana Linssen. And they’ve clearly had much to chew over, based on the spirited discussion on the purpose of reviewing that comprises the trainees’ meeting with the Daily Tiger, which ranges from such knotty questions as who exactly it is they write for (filmmakers or film viewers?) to a lengthy disquisition on journalistic ethics based on a reading of Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous.

There is, of course, a very practical side to the traineeship. The six, for instance, have voting rights on the FIPRESCI Tiger jury, collectively comprising one vote on the panel, and they are each required to contribute to a piece to the FIPRESCI website.

They can also pitch pieces and contribute to the Daily Tiger. And they are all expected to file a report on the festival to the publications with which they are affiliated back home.

Above all, it’s the exposure to a major festival like IFFR that is most instructive. What especially excites is the dialogue between critics and filmmakers that takes place in Rotterdam. “You can see someone’s film, then approach them afterwards and talk about it,” says Hartzhein. “All barriers are down.”

Alamar

The IFFR Trainee Project for Young Film Critics 2010

photo: Tobias Davidson

Mundane History

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5

Take The Money And Run IFFR’s Break Even Store has not only been the hip festival hang-out, but has also been raking in the moolah. Richard James Havis reports

Rotterdam programmer turned store manager Edwin Carels is a very happy man. “The Break Even Store is taking more than €1,000 a day,” he says gleefully, “which is more than I expected. What’s more, it’s been my best festival for meeting people, as everyone seems to drop by here.” Indeed, the Store’s sleek design and performance space do seem to have made it the cool hang-out of the Festival.

“CineMart people have been using it, and the Kino Climates crowd have been meeting up here. I’ve also had a lot of filmmakers coming in and giving me their DVDs to give away, which I’ve been doing,” says Carels. Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s specialty coffee – which comes in a packet with his face on it – has almost sold out, adds Carels, and old copes of Cahiers du Cinema have been selling well at €5 an issue.

The public have also been dropping by, says Carels, although some of them have been a bit confused.

“This store space is usually used to promote the flats

A fest of firsts The Daily Tiger’s Los Angeles Bureau Chief Sandy Bridges (Ms) rounds-up the festival and pronounces it “Fine”

Hi everyone, Sandy here, making a late entrance with it this year! As it’s the last one of the paper the Ed (who is really named Ed!) asked me to round it all up, so here I am ;-) Well, I had a good time at the festival this year, it was very relaxed, a bit like a holiday. There was a lot of sitting down going on rather than the usual standing up, even at the Cinemarket, and I think this made it one to remember. One of the things I liked a lot was the little Break In Shop on the corner, which Edwin had opened because the festival didn’t have enough money this year so they had to sell old stuff like magazines. They had imported a famous coffee roaster there from Taiwan to make the special coffee in it, he was called Tsai Ming although Edwin had to make it. (Btw in my coffee shop in LA we have a girl making coffee and she is called “Tea” and that’s for real!!)

We also did some cool firsts on our newspaper.

One first thing we did was have a guy on the cover with no shoes or socks on. Is this safe or even hygienic in an urban place? Maybe it’s the new trend, cos I’m sure I saw it on a film poster too. Our Ed did a first, too, he stopped a fight!!

We were all really shocked, cos he normally starts them. Anyway, he got kissed for doing it(!). The festival did a first by having directors from Georgia here. I thought this would be fun as I have a good friend (Ms. Abigail SchmidtRotluff) who lives in Atlanta, but when I went to meet them they all spoke Russian! Have the Russians taken it over behind our backs?

There were also people from Africa here, that was nice, as you don’t normally get to meet them much.

I didn’t have any big worries about the festival this year. The Cinemarketeers I interviewed managed to find the marketing place ok, even without the signage I used to lobby for, so that was fine, seems I was wrong about it all, sorry.

(Can I come back into it now I’ve said that?)

The weather was a bit bad too, I couldn’t wear my cool sunglasses, but even we can’t change that, and we’re American. Apart from that it was fine. Good work, everybody!

Yrs, Sandy Bridges (still Ms).

that are being built opposite,” says Carels. “So we’ve had quiet a few people coming in here who were interested in buying flats. But I’m not going to tell you how many flats we’ve sold.” Interestingly, the shop has to abide by the local retail laws and Carels has to spend a lot of time bar-coding his wares and doing the accounts in the evening. “The Rotterdam Film Festival has to follow the law,” he says. “I knew nothing about this kind of thing when I started, so the whole experience has been like running the first reel of a film while you’re making the next one.”

Carels says that, although he’s enjoyed it, he won’t be reopening the Break Even Store next year. But the possibility of promoting himself to store manager and hiring some employees to run it was discussed: “That way we could have an employee of the week award,” he says, “which would be nice.”

Things are also going well at the IFFR merchandising stand in De Doelen. “We sold out of the I-pod sacks in three days,” say Louise Clarke and Ravel Siahaya. “The scarves and black T-shirts have been selling well, and when it rained we sold a lot of umbrellas.“ They’d like to see more purchases of the Cinema Reloaded T-shirts, they say: “That’s why we’re wearing them.”

photo: Ruud Jonkers

Home and Away The first results of a recent initiative by Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX festival to match international filmmakers together were shown at IFFR. Edward Lawrenson reports

Tine Fischer is back in Copenhagen, where she runs the city’s CPH:DOX International Documentary Film Festival, having just spent a few days at IFFR. The festival has been good for her. It was here that she learned that Burma VJ has received an Oscar nomination. A Danish production, the film received its world premiere at CPH:DOX in 2008 (where it won the main jury award). Fischer also used the IFFR to preview footage shot for a new documentary by directors Michael Noer and Khavn de la Cruz, titled Son of God, part of one of the first of twelve films made under CPH:DOX’s new DOX:LAB initiative.

Launched in 2009, the idea behind the scheme is to partner young international filmmakers on productions with an experimental brief. Seeking to match twelve directors from the Nordic countries with twelve from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, DOX:LAB’s debut project sees Denmark’s Michael Noer join creative forces with the Philippines’

Son of God

Khavn De La Cruz.

“I wanted to set up a dialogue between different film cultures,” says Fischer of the new talent workshop. “The Danish documentary scene has had some success in recent years, but productions are financed within a tight framework, always with some involvement by broadcasters.”

With each pair of filmmakers awarded an €11,000 budget (drawn from funds granted by the Danish Film Institute, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Danish National Film School), the DOX:LAB projects can evolve without the “usual business restraints.” The result of the submissions so far,

Fischer continues, is a high level of playfulness and aesthetic ambition. “The starting point for us,” she continues, “isn’t what platform the film will end up on. They can be any length and any format. Some will be suitable for TV. Others will be strictly festival films.”

The non-Nordic filmmakers are all from the developing world – a decision encouraged by existing cultural support streams run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Fischer expects the meeting between first and third-world production models will be instructive “Without a great deal of money, Filipino directors have, for instance, created a distinctive and outward-looking documentary scene,” she argues.

The presence of filmmakers like De La Cruz (who has a film in the Forget Africa strand this year) and 2008 Tiger competitor John Torres points to the international and experimental aspirations shared between IFFR and CPH:DOX. “Rotterdam is a great inspiration,” says Fischer. “Like our festival, it’s interested in the crossovers between cultures and forms.” Indeed, IFFR provided concrete support in the form of advice: Where Is Africa programmer Gertjan Zuilhof advising on the selection of the participating African filmmakers.

Funds join forces IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund has announced a new collaboration with IDFA’s Jan Vrijman Fund. Edward Lawrenson reports

The Hubert Bals Fund announced its plans to collaborate with the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam’s Jan Vrijman Fund on Thursday. Both funds exist to support the production of independent cinema in the developing world, with the Hubert Bals Fund focussing on features and the Jan Vrijman Fund on documentaries.

The announcement comes as the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs pledged continued financial support to both funds until 2012. The Hubert Bals Fund is to receive €750,000, a sum that will be decreased to €600,000 by 2012.

“We’re very happy and thankful for the contin-

Iwana Chronis

ued support,” says Hubert Bals Fund manager Iwana Chronis, “especially in these more difficult times for development aid.” The lowering of the

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Ministry’s guaranteed fund over three years will, Chronis continues, encourage the Fund “to look for other financial resources elsewhere.”

The collaboration between The Hubert Bals Fund and the Jan Vrijman Fund grows out of informal support the two organisations have lent to one another over the years. “We both fund different projects,” explains Chronis, “but together we will focus on supporting local distribution and training in developing countries. We also plan to pay attention to the poorer countries. There are still some countries we don’t receive a lot of applications for, especially in Africa.”

With this in mind, the two funds are setting up a tour of a programme of five features and five documentaries in ten African festivals. The selection will include Le Jardin du Papa from Congo, Un Matin Bonne Heure from Guinea and Sea Point Days from South Africasx.

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Out of the womb Omar Rodriguez Lopez is an unusual debut director, even by Rotterdam’s eclectic standards, as Ben Walters finds out

other people’s features in the past, also wrote the music for The Sentimental Engine Slayer. “That’s the easiest part for me,” he says, unsurprisingly.

“I don’t have to communicate ideas or translate things. With other people’s movies it can take hours to get three notes – the director says ‘I want the three notes of travel.’ What the fuck is that?!”

Rodriguez Lopez is keen to question conventional categories. He rejects the term ‘artist’ as bourgeois, preferring to find evidence of being expressive in a range of activities. “We each find our way. The guy who kicks the ball at the goal or shoots the gun at the ‘enemy’ is also trying to figure out who he is.” He has a similarly permeable take on what forms his work. “Watching films shaped my music. People ask who my biggest influence playing guitar is and I say Margrit Carstensen in Fassbinder films – that’s how I want to play! If I make music and my influence is music, then I’m just copying. If I like a character and want to capture that feeling, then I have to dig and dig and dig – but when I find water, it’s the sweetest.”

It’s not just that he’s already world famous as a musician – he’s the guitarist with band The Mars Volta – but the film he’s premiering in the Bright Future strand, The Sentimental Engine Slayer, is only one of five features he has already completed. Clearly, the prodigiously prolific production rate for which he is renowned as a musician applies to his interest in filmmaking as well.

“This is the first film I showed to anybody,” Rodriguez Lopez says, “the first to go outside the womb or the nest. I’ve always got a film project on the go.

I’ve made a lot of shorts, just for the process of it.

The process is everything, the experience is everything. It’s a form of therapy.”

Shoestring

Dating from 2007, The Sentimental Engine Slayer was produced on a shoestring with collaborators “sleeping on the floor for a month.” It follows Barlam, a young Texan struggling to make sense of family, sex, drugs, work and the world in general. Expressive and increasingly psychedelic, it’s a heady, empathetic piece, moving but not sentimental in any conventional sense. Rodriguez Lopez is compelling as Barlam but, he says, playing the role was an entirely contingent decision. “It was not something I wanted to do. I hate being the centre of attention – like with the band, my friend is at the front, I let everyone focus on him while I concentrate on the music! But my main actor walked away a week before shooting. He was offered a paying job. So it was a question of whether to let the project die or step into something I already knew so well.”

Language

The Sentimental Engine Slayer’s characters frequently slip between English and Spanish in a way that is a daily reality for millions of Americans, but is rarely seen on screen. This, the filmmaker says, is

Joined-up

America, and even white life is not untouched by all the peoples that made the country.”

Rodriguez Lopez, who lived in Amsterdam for a while – “It was great but it’s too cold for my blood. I need a blue sky” – has been enjoying his first visit to IFFR. “It’s great that this festival supports expression rather than glamour,” he says.

After Rotterdam, he’s returning to his current home, near Guadalajara, Mexico, to finish off his latest feature, which he will be submitting to festivals. “I’m finishing a cut on another film too, and there are five or six records that have to be mixed, a dog that needs to be fed, a mother who needs to be called...” His, then, is a joined-up life: “My music is not different from my film is not different from my cooking is not different from this conversation. It’s all part of the project.”

WTF

The Sentimental Engine Slayer

As well as writing, directing, designing and starring in the film, Rodriguez Lopez, who has scored

Omar Rodriguez Lopez Sat 06 20:00 PA5

Omar Rodriguez Lopez

“something I don’t like about American cinema, especially underground or independent cinema.

They look down their nose at Hollywood but they give us the same version of America. It doesn’t reflect reality, and when it does, it’s sad stereotypes that border on racism. They just show white life in

photo: Ramon Mangold