Daily Tiger UK #4

41st International Film Festival Rotterdam #4 sunDAY 29 january 2012

Giving the business a boost with new additions to the IFFR’s industry services: CineMart’s Emmy Sidiras, Nienke Poelsma, Jacobine van der Vloed, Tobias Pausinger, Fay Breeman and Jolinde den Haas.

photo: Corinne de Korver

A Perfect Trajectory This year’s CineMart is a mix of the old and the new, Nick Cunningham reports

“Co-production has always been an important means of raising production finance, and will remain so,” stresses CineMart acting chief Jacobine van der Vloed ahead of the event’s 29th edition.

While the CineMart format remains essentially unchanged this year, key augmentations to the programme serve to meet the changing needs and requirements of market attendees. Producers representing 36 projects from 31 countries will again vie for the attention of some of international cinema’s leading financiers, sales agents, distributors and co-production personnel during a series of one-to-one meetings.

On the closing night, two prizes will be awarded to two outstanding projects: the ARTE France Cinéma Award worth 10,000 Euros and the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award, valued at 30,000 Euros. Over the next four days, Film Office staff will remain on hand to provide industry consultancy to IFFR (and CineMart) filmmakers within the Industry Club. The Video Library will afford delegates the opportunity to check out the previous works of pitching producers and directors, and panels will again be organised on key aspects of industry concern to attending professionals. As in past years, the cream of emerging production talent will be feted and nurtured within the Rotterdam Lab. Additions

So far so familiar, but Van der Vloed stresses three important additions to the standard bill of fare. This

year’s selection includes the first projects chosen within the Boost! programme, launched at IFFR 2011. Boost! is an initiative by the Hubert Bals Fund, CineMart and the Amsterdam-based Binger Filmlab, and its aim is to stimulate the financial, creative and network potential of high-quality projects from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe. “It strikes me as strange that we never thought of this before,” Van der Vloed comments. “We have the Hubert Bals Fund, through which we support filmmakers in developing their scripts. Then we have this amazing Binger on Demand training programme, and then there is CineMart. It’s a perfect trajectory.

Of course, it’s the first year so we’ll have to see, and for some of the projects it might be a little early, but on the other hand I think it’s definitely worth it. Some of these producers might not walk away with a deal but, sitting at the table and telling their unique story at least fifty times in four days and receiving all these comments, feedback and advice, that’s really going to help. For us, it is very important to provide this possibility to filmmakers who apply for Hubert Bals Fund script development. Both the Fund and CineMart offer a stamp of approval. Interested parties will assess these projects very seriously.”

Different angle

This year, six of the CineMart projects are from established visual artists. These include painter/ sculptor Henry Coombes’ Little Dog Boy (UK) and Knut Åsdam’s Murmansk Kirkenes (Germany, Norway). Van der Vloed and her team were keen to

allow professionals to explore further this emerging fusion of disciplines, so they organised a CineMart panel Art:Film, co-hosted by Screen International and CPH:DOX (today from 16:00 to 18:00 in the Juriaanse Zaal in de Doelen ). “In previous years, we received many transmedia projects, and this year a lot of projects came from artist/filmmakers. They are a completely different type of project and approach the craft of filmmaking from a different angle. So we invited panellists from museums and galleries, and prominent producers like Simon Field, who produces the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who is also an artist. We hope we will find answers to what this shift in emphasis can offer filmmakers and artists in terms of new financing structures. Even galleries are now producing films. The number of financing opportunities is increasing.”

Dark Room

Another innovation this year is the Dark Room, a private viewing space on the third floor of de Doelen, complete with DVD/Blu-ray player and widescreen LED monitor, offered to sales agents and producers.

“They can book a two-hour slot free of charge and use it for their own professional purposes. For a work in progress, or whatever they like. We give them the key and then it’s all theirs.” The Dark Room has proven a runaway success, as all the slots (Saturday to Wednesday, 09:00 – 20:00 hours) are fully booked.

The 2012 CineMart selection sees the welcome return of British, Greek and the Spanish pitching producers, with two projects each. Last year, there were no

projects from these countries, but Van der Vloed is at pains to emphasise that their inclusion this year is solely down to the quality of the projects, and not a redressing of the balance. “On the other hand,” she adds, “we noticed for a number of years that it was difficult to get projects from Spain, which is why we formed a collaboration between Catalan Films & TV and the Rotterdam Lab. We build up these relationships so they may come back in later years with a project.”

Pulling power

The 2012 IFFR programme includes nine former CineMart projects, including the closing film, Daniel Nettheim’s The Hunter which was pitched in 2004. So, with a plethora of co-production markets throughout the yearly calendar, how does CineMart retain both its pulling power and reputation as the pitching platform par excellence? Through continuing year-round awareness of the needs and demands of its users, Van der Vloed argues. “It’s important that we stay connected with the producers and the sales agents, and all the other professionals, and really discuss with them what their needs are,” she points out. “That’s why we regularly attend training platforms like EAVE and ACE in order to ask attendees what they want from a market like CineMart and what their goals are. We try to have an open dialogue, and I think each year the concept works. Sometimes we ask in-house: should we re-structure; but no, it really does work the way it is.

But what you must do is to continually add value, and that’s what we’ve tried to do this year.”

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Filmmaker to make film (maybe) In Rotterdam with his award-winning film Le Havre, living legend Aki Kaurismäki has confirmed a new project (or two, or three…). Geoffrey Macnab reports

In Rotterdam this weekend, Finnish maestro Aki Kaurismäki has confirmed that he is to join forces with fellow auteurs Manoel De Oliveira, Jean-Luc Godard, Pedro Costa and Victor Erice on a special portmanteau picture to be shot in Guimarães in northern Portugal. The film is being made as part of the celebrations to mark the city’s status as 2012 “European Capital of Culture.”

“We may never meet, but we will make a collection of short films together,” Kaurismäki says.

“When Oliveira shoots his film, he will be 103 years old, which is some kind of record, but his age is not important. His intelligence is important.” The directors will be given full freedom over what form their own contributions take.

Kaurismäki has been in Rotterdam to support the screening of his new feature, Le Havre (which will be released in the Netherlands by A-Film).

The Finnish director (who has been living in Portugal for 23 years) said he had given his word he would make the Guimarães film before starting working on Le Havre. “I promised to do this before Le Havre… and I have to keep my promise.”

Le Havre has just been nominated for Best Film at the 37th César awards. Kaurismäki was also nominated for a Best Director César and Wouter Zoon for Best Production Design.

Le Havre premiered at the 64th Cannes Film Festival last year and won the FIPRESCI award there. Since then, it has won (among other prizes) the ARRI award for Best International Feature at Germany’s FilmFest München and a Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival.

Kaurismäki was non-committal about rumours that he intended Le Havre as part of a new “trilogy”, with subsequent films to be shot in Spain and in Germany. The Finnish director said that the idea of the trilogy had started as a joke, but that he is now beginning to take it seriously. “Who lives will see,” he says cryptically of the trilogy. “It was basically a joke, but when the joke spread out, it seems I have to do it… to live up to the joke!” Asked to confirm which countries he would shoot in, Kaurismäki said, “Spain – and North Korea.”

Film office Film Office staff are on hand in the Industry Club on the 4th floor of de Doelen to enable IFFR and CineMart filmmakers to promote their films effectively to the sales, distribution and festival personnel attending IFFR 2012.

Filmmakers are encouraged to take one-to-one meetings with the Industry consultants who will assist them in making the most of their stay in Rotterdam, developing strategies for furthering their films and connecting them to key industry players, as well as informing buyers about the selected films.

Fourth-floor panels today include a CineMart case study at which Marit van den Elshout and producer Jaime Romandia will take a look at the effectiveness of co-production markets (10:30 to 12:00), and an assessment of the workings of the Hubert Bals Fund with the Fund’s Janneke Langelaan and producer Benjamin Domenech (12:30 to 14:00).

Tomorrow sees a panel weighing up the merits of DIY distribution within an industry weighted towards contracted-out sales (10:30 to 12:00), while Tuesday’s panel sees David Pope and industry experts explain why we should embrace online platforms (10:30 to 12:00).

Pay pals Fast-expanding online film platform Festival Scope is to adopt a “pay model”, Geoffrey Macnab reports

Paris-based business-to-business venture, launched by Alessandro Raja (ex-Celluloid Dreams) and Mathilde Henrot (ex-MK2) in the autumn of 2010, is expected to begin charging users annual subscription fees within the next 12 months. These plans were confirmed by Henrot in Rotterdam this weekend.

Festival Scope is working with more than 70 festivals worldwide (up from 30 this time last year). It has expanded its collaboration with the Berlinale (and will be working this year with Generations, and with Panorama, Forum and the CoProduction Market). Festival Scope has also recently partnered with Sundance.

“We regularly receive requests from festivals wanting to join in and present their programming on Festival Scope. Every week, we receive a couple of requests.

Unfortunately, we can’t accept them all”, Henrot says.

The platform is aimed at industry professionals (especially distributors, sales agents, producers and programmers) and showcases titles from these festivals that can be watched “on demand”. The goal is to boost the revenues of sales agents, rights holders and producers while expanding programming possibilities for

Helicopter view festival programmers, exhibitors and broadcasters.

“The business model so far is mainly focused on the subsidies received from MEDIA, CNC and private funding by Oséo,” Hernot says, adding the subscription system will be embraced within the next year. “It it will be affordable enough that any professionals who need to screen films for their business can afford to.”

Since its launch, Henrot says, Festival Scope has turned into “a significant tool very much used by the industry.”

One of its attractions is its ability to track how often films are watched online, who is watching them and who is subscribing. This year, Festival Scope is again working very closely with the IFFR, profiling CineMart titles as well as making CineMart directors’ previous films available to watch online.

Henrot is in Rotterdam in a dual capacity. Alongside her work with Festival Scope, she also runs production outfit Maharaja Films. Maharaja is one of the partners on Duncharon, the new project from Attenberg director Athina Rachel Tsangari, being presented in CineMart.

Another Maharaja production, The Strife of Love in a Dream, is an international premiere in IFFR’s Spectrum Shorts. Earlier this month, it was confirmed that Henrot and Raja will join UK journalist Mike Goodridge to programme a new section at the Sarajevo Festival called “Kinoscope”.

Rich contraband Rotterdam-based producer Dirk Rijneke is reaping rich Rotterdam-related rewards, Geoffrey Macnab reports

New Mark Wahlberg movie Contraband has made $50 million at the US box-office since its release in mid-January… and one Rotterdam-based producer is counting the till receipts with relish.

Dirk Rijneke of Rotterdam Films was co-producer on Reykjavik Rotterdam (2009), the Icelandic-Dutch coproduction on which Contraband is based. Rotterdam Films partnered with Balatsar Kormakur’s Blueeyes Productions on Reykjavik Rotterdam (shown at IFFR in 2010 and starring Kormakur). While Rijneke wasn’t directly involved in the US remake (which Kormakur himself directed), he played his part in the remake negotiations and in selling the script to Universal. More to the point, he has a small stake in the movie, a no. 1 hit in the US. “We all were surprised that it was number one,” Rijneke says of Contraband, which now looks set to make him a very tidy profit. “It is quite interesting for us, and it is a lot of money,” the Rotterdam Films boss declares, but is too coy to say precisely how much of a windfall Contraband will bring to him.

Buoyed up by the success of Contraband, Rotterdam Films is now pushing ahead with various other projects on its slate. Among these is former CineMart project

Dirk Rijneke

photo: Felix Kalkman

The Silent Ones, directed by Rijneke’s daughter Ricky Rijneke and starring Orsi Toth (a Shooting Star at Berlin in 2009). The film is currently in post-production. Andrei Dergachyov, composer on The Banishment and The Return, has come on board to write the music.

Contact Film will handle the distribution.

Dirk Rijneke is hatching some new films of his own.

Among these is Call Signal Forty, a feature-doc about the murky side of politics in Rotterdam. He has also recently shot another doc, Boatmen, about day-to-day life in Rotterdam’s port.

Meanwhile, Ricky Rijneke is also plotting a new feature.

Rotterdam Films was founded by Rijneke and Mildred van Leeuwaarden in 1979. Its film Voro-Nova opened the Rotterdam Festival in 1985.

The latest project by Swedish producer Erik Hemmendorff is set to be a – literal – landslide. Nick Cunningham reports

“This is a project that comes out of pure joy,” producer Erik Hemmendorff explains of his CineMart 2012 selection Turist, to be directed by long-time collaborator Ruben Östlund. The tragi-comic film will detail a holiday at a European ski resort in which well-to-do tourists “lose their dignity”. The project also promises the most spectacular avalanche sequence in cinematic history. Östlund may be back on safe ground, having previously directed three ski films, but Hemmendorff nips in the bud any suggestion that complacency may be about to set in. “Those films made Ruben a kind of superstar in the free-skiing circle. Everybody in that world knows who he is. This film is going to be an adventure, but he really only wants to do something if it is really testing. In filmmaking terms, this will be a black run.”

According to Hemmendorff, controlled avalanches are part and parcel of life in the alpine world, set off to restrict the build-up of potentially dangerous snow reserves. From a production perspective, it’s simply a matter of knowing who to contact. Hemmendorff and Östlund have already scouted extensively in Italy and Switzerland, as well as in Canada where snow is abundant and avalanches very large. But wherever Östlund eventually decides to shoot his avalanche sequence, the producer expects awe-inspiring results.

“This is a scene we have been talking about for years,” Hemmendorff stresses. “We’ll rent a helicopter, buy a lot of dynamite and make sure that a very large area is made very, very secure. It sounds big, but we want this to be one of the grand and memorable scenes within European cinema.”

The collaboration between Hemmendorff and Östlund goes back to film school. After graduation, they launched Plattform Produktion in 2002 to elevate Swedish productions out of the blandest of doldrums, as they saw it – “apart from Roy Andersson, who inhabited his own universe,” the producer adds.

Their CineMart past is impressive, having successfully pitched (and delivered) Involuntary (2007) and Play (2009). The latter was selected for the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 2011.

This year, the team is keen to assemble the best possible co-pro team to deliver the “minimum” 2.75 million Euro film. Hemmendorff is also keen to start scouting for a high-profile international cast of actors.

But first things first, he maintains. “At CineMart, we will get the opportunity to test all the scenes on a lot of very intelligent and experienced people. Our experience with Involuntary was that the producers you had a real connection with in Rotterdam were the ones that you eventually closed the deal with. It will probably not happen in the five days of CineMart, but by next week I expect to have a very good idea of how we can package this into the very best film we can make.”

At your service (left to right): Jannie Langbroek, Thomas Crommentuyn, Hayet Benkara, Thomas Corona, Samanta Telleri, Mary Davies, Aneta Lesnikovska, Nikolas Montaldi, Myrthe Terpstra, Jolinde den Haas, Inke van Loocke and Marina Kožul

photo: Corinne de Korver

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Wonderland

Sister act

Romance Joe is a captivatingly complex debut feature from Tiger competitor Lee Kwang-Kuk. By Edward Lawrenson

The Rest of the World is Damien Odoul’s most feminine work to date. By Geoffrey Macnab

Towards the end of Romance Joe, the debut feature

by South Korean writer-director Lee Kwang-Kuk, a character says: “Everyone has a story to tell.” It’s a conviction that is at the heart of this engaging puzzlepiece of a film, and one that Lee himself shares: “Everyone in the world lives in their own universe, within which they have their stories. Everywhere you look – here, for instance,” says Lee, gesturing at the many other delegates engaged in conversations on the second floor of de Doelen – “you see people talking, about their lives, giving each other part of their stories.

I want to introduce that feel into my own film.”

In fact, Romance Joe is a playful tangle of stories.

Named after a despairing film director who wants to commit suicide, the movie follows stories that unfold within stories in a complex yet engaging Russian dolllike structure inspired by Escher’s famous image of one hand drawing another. At key moments, a white rabbit appears; a reference, Lee agrees, that brings to mind Lewis Carroll, another artist fascinated by the compulsion to tell stories. “That detail occurred during filming,” says Lee. “Because the storyline is a little like Alice in Wonderland, we put a rabbit in it.”

Mostly, though, the film’s structure closely followed

Lee’s screenplay. The film’s elegant visual style – he shoots in long, fluid, unbroken takes – was developed during the writing process. “I was thinking about the conversation between the camera and the actors while writing the screenplay. I don’t rehearse my actors. When I arrive at locations, that’s when I plan out specifically what I wanted to do. We film the first take, and if there are details I want to change, I film another one.”

A former collaborator of Hong Sang-Soo, Lee credits the South Korean as an influence: “He’s an example and inspiration, and he’s provided guidance and advice on earlier projects – though not this one.” The fact that Hong won a Tiger in 1997 for The Day a Pig Fell into the Well adds to the “honour” Lee feels about being in Rotterdam. “Plus, I like the atmosphere here”, says the director, once again nodding in the direction of the other festival guests in the de Doelen; a hall full of people telling their stories.

Tiger Awards Competition Romance Joe – Lee Kwang-Kuk Sun 29 Jan 15:15 CI3 (Press & Industry) Sun 29 Jan 18:45 PA5 Mon 30 Jan 12:30 PA7 Tue 31 Jan 22:00 LV5 Thu 02 Feb 13:15 PA3 Sat 04 Feb 15:45 PA5

No, Damien Odoul insists, his new film The Rest of the World (a world premiere in IFFR’s Spectrum) is not directly autobiographical. However, he acknowledges that his screenplay was partially inspired by events in his own life. “In my mother’s family, my aunt wasn’t the daughter of my grandfather,” he says.

“Upon the death of my aunt, the secret of this family came out.”

The Rest of the World is Odoul at his most intimate, and his most feminine. The protagonists here – three sisters trying to make sense of grief, deception and upheaval in their lives – are very different from the belligerent and drunken male adolescent in the director’s breakthrough feature, Le Souffle (Deep Breath).

“After my last film, The Story of Richard O, with Mathieu Amalric, I needed to make a movie around the female world. It was important for me to try to get in touch with the feminine.” In the new film, Marie-Eve Nadeau plays Eve, a young woman whose boyfriend abruptly and inexplicably commits suicide. She and her two sisters have an uncomfortable relationship with their father’s heavy-drinking and volatile new wife, played by Emanuelle Beart.

The early scenes, in which Eve is shown in a grief-

stricken daze, are more in the vein of Kieslowski’s Three Colours Blue than the director’s earlier work.

Nadeau, a Canadian-born model, is a non-professional actress. “I love to work with non-professionals,” the director says of his lead (who is also his girlfriend).

Eve’s sisters are likewise played by non-professionals. However, in the supporting casting are such well-known figures as Beart, Amalric and Charles Berling. Odoul deliberately casts the famous actors in secondary roles while putting the unknowns in the foreground.

“I am not an actress and it is not something I want to do, but because it was Damien and I know his work, his sensibility, I decided to embark on the adventure,” Nadeau states. “I never had the feeling I was making a movie. It was more about living an experience.

Damien uses quite a small crew. My preparation for the role was spending time with the actresses playing my sisters, to create a bond.”

Odoul describes The Rest of the World as his “most classical” film to date. Nadeau, meanwhile, sees the movie as subtle and very oblique. “It’s all about what is unsaid... what people don’t say, don’t express and don’t hear.”

The Rest of the World – Damien Odoul

Sun 29 Jan 09:15 CI1 Tue 31 Jan 17:30 LV3

Transcendent my ass!

James Franco is both creator and subject of the experimental Francophrenia (or: Don’t Kill Me, I Know Where the Baby Is). Ben Walters reports

Ryuji Otusuka and Huang Ji

photo: Lucia Guglielmetti

Breaking the silence There’s a moving personal story behind Huang Ji’s remarkable feature debut. By Edward Lawrenson

Huang Ji’s heartfelt and powerful drama Egg and Stone is set in a remote village in southern China and revolves around Honggui, a fragile-looking 14-year-old girl sent to live with her aunt and uncle by parents working in another province. The story, the bright and engaging Huang says, is largely autobiographical; an admission that is unsettling when you realise that her lead character is the victim of terrible sexual abuse.

“The girl’s story is mine,” says Huang. “My movies all relate to my personal experience. My last short, The Warmth of Orange Peel, was about my relationship with my father. If you handle a difficult subject matter, then you can sort of box it in and leave it behind,” she says.

What made the process especially delicate was the fact she’d never before spoken about her childhood abuse. So telling her parents and other relatives – who appear in the movie, which she shot in her home village – was difficult. She adds (this time breaking into English instead of using the interpreter): “I felt shame bringing it up, but I now feel I can talk about it.” Her boyfriend, Ryuji Otusuka – who shot the film and is with her in Rotterdam – didn’t know about this either. “We’ve been living together for six years. I want to marry him and have a baby. And so this was an opportunity to tell him”, the director says.

Non-professional Yao Hong-gui gives a remarkable performance playing Honggui. Huang found her at

a nearby school. “I went to a lot of middle schools in the area and looked at about 500 girls. Because I’m not a famous director I can’t just hold an audition, so I’d just stand at the school entrance and watch the students as they came out! They all though I was some kind of imposter!”

Huang was impressed upon seeing Yao entering the school and waited until lunchtime to see her again.

“I followed her home,” she laughs. “I approached her family and I said I am at the Beijing Film Academy, I’m interested in your daughter, can I eat with you? Chinese people won’t refuse such requests – although they thought I was crazy! But I was just looking at her the whole time during the meal, and then I decided to use her for sure.” What was it about Yao that made her want to cast the teenager?

“Her eyes looked really lonely,” Huang says.

The crew consisted just of Huang and Ryuji, who lends the film a sparse, sombre beauty. Ryuji also financed the film himself. Sitting alongside Huang, he laughs: “Originally I was going to make a feature film – I’m also a director – but instead I gave her a chance, and all my money!”

The film is yet to be picked up by a sales agent, but Huang hopes it might acquire one here at the IFFR.

What’s going on with James Franco? Hollywood actor, Oscar host, writer of fiction, graduate student, soap opera guest star, experimental fine artist… It’s little wonder many commentators don’t quite know what to do with him. And his latest escapade, which gets its world premiere in Rotterdam, is unlikely to make things any clearer.

Running at around 70 minutes, it’s a further iteration of Franco’s appearances in the US soap General Hospital, in which he played a homicidal performance artist called Franco – appearances that were arguably a kind of performance art in themselves, and have already been fodder for gallery-based work. Francophrenia (or: Don’t Kill Me, I Know Where the Baby Is), a world premiere in Spectrum, uses documentary footage shot alongside the climax of Franco’s storyline, which took place at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. “It was about bringing high art and low art together, where the shoot becomes a kind of installation at the museum,” says co-director Ian Olds. Olds wasn’t directly involved with the General Hospital project but had edited a conventional behind-the-scenes documentary about Saturday Night Live that James Franco directed, and Franco gave him the MOCA footage to see what he might make of it.

“I didn’t think there was the material for a straight documentary,” he says, “but what occurred to me was the idea of a fictional third level of Franco.” Fran-

cophrenia initially shows the actor engaged in the business of show – getting his make-up done, doing multiple takes, engaging with autograph hunters.

There’s a certain innate surreality to the situation, but then things get really weird with the introduction of an increasingly megalomaniacal and paranoid fictional voiceover (“I begat this motherfucker!”; “Transcendent, my ass!”). “When I show it to people, it seems like either a comedy or a horror movie, or both”, Olds chuckles.

“James gave me and my writing partner [Paul Felten] the freedom to explore, manipulate and mess with his image,” he continues. “He didn’t try to intervene or protect his celebrity. He became both the creator and the subject of this experiment.” The voiceover was intended to be recorded by Franco but Olds’s own temporary track proved to have a compelling allure.

“There was something about the distance created by this internal monologue being read by someone else.

It was a playful way of engaging with everyone questioning what’s going on with Franco – is he for real?”

And, is he? “I really can’t speak for him, but I think he’s a genuine guy, using his celebrity to find ways to engage creatively. He’s not trying to create some easily digestible image – he’s really following his instincts about what interests him in art.”

Francophrenia (or: Don’t Kill Me, I Know Where the Baby Is) – James Franco & Ian Olds

Mon 30 Jan 18:15 DDJZ (Press & Industry) Tue 31 Jan 18:00 PA6 Wed 01 Feb 21:45 PA5 Fri 03 Feb 11:45 CI1 Sat 04 Feb 09:45 CI7

Tiger Awards Competition Egg and Stone – Huang Ji

Sun 29 Jan 16:30 PA4 Mon 30 Jan 13:30 PA4 Tue 31 Jan 12:15 PA6 Wed 01 Feb 19:45 LV 3 Thu 02 Feb 09:45 DDJZ (Press & Industry) Sat 04 Feb 10:30 PA4

Francophrenia (or: Don’t Kill Me, I Know Where the Baby Is)

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Spewing forth pearls The IFFR’s Mouth of Garbage programme challenges and stimulates the IFFR audience with a radical mix of themes and genres, Ben Walters writes

“There’s a programming line that says we want to promote good values and ethics and have the audience identify with films and characters in a positive way,” observes IFFR programmer Gabe Klinger.

“With some of these films, we want the audience to be repelled. Is that such a bad thing? It’s a different emotion to bring out of the theatre.”

Klinger, who divides his time between Brazil and Chicago, has been the driving force behind The Mouth of Garbage: Subculture and Sex in Sao Paulo 19671987, a strand in this year’s IFFR Signals programme.

Boasting 18 titles, mostly in new prints, Mouth of Garbage refers to the Brazilian city’s Boca do Lixo district, a down-at-heel neighborhood that became the location of a thriving and unapologetically trashy grass-roots film industry at a time of considerable upheaval in the country. Dynamic for two decades, its output has been largely overlooked ever since.

Radical diversity

“In Brazil, these are films that are widely disparaged and forgotten because they’re thought of as lowbrow,” Klinger notes. “At the time, people were focusing on Cinema Novo and high-end studio production; Boca do Lixo films were thought of as trash and most had no life beyond their original release. But the high-end studio model failed and, to a greater or lesser degree, Cinema Novo failed as well. These are films that found an audience.”

The scene is perhaps most closely associated with exploitation genres – its breakout figure, Coffin Joe (screen name of filmmaker and actor Jose Mojica Marins) delivered provocative doses of sex, drugs and violence in films like Awakening of the Beast. But Klinger asserts that Boca filmmakers were interested in other areas, and generally celebratory rather than simply provocative. “Today’s audiences can appreciate their high artistic quality and their radical diversity – there’s porn, Westerns, horror films, crime movies, social satire, Super 8 diary films, weird experimen-

tal hippie films, even Catholic films. The Boca do Lixo represents this very rich, full spectrum of what cinema can do.”

These filmmakers often lived in the area, developing a miniature studio system that bloomed against a backdrop of repression at the end of the 1960s. “They really promoted that idea of camaraderie. There was a bar where they all met. Ozualdo Candeias [whose work is shown in the season] was a real chronicler of this community. In one of our shorts, Party in the Boca, they do an informal ceremony on the street where they give out prizes to their favourite people: starlet of the year, electrician of the year. There’s a guy perched on top of a truck throwing out medals while drinking cachaca and dancing capoeira.”

Celebrating sexuality

The films’ liberated approach certainly struck a chord.

“They’re good-natured, like Radley Metzger or Russ Meyer – films that say ‘We like sex and there’s nothing wrong with that.’ This was a call to a new era, an explosion of freedom. For the most part, sex is presented very tastefully. I think it’s going to be so cool to see these hardcore porn films with a big audience, especially like Oh! Rebuceteio. It’s one of the few hardcore films of the era that manages to be interesting in terms of mise en scène and how it plays with spectatorship.

The first scene develops into this massive orgy where all the actors in a stage play have sex on stage in front of their director and producer, and finally the audience joins in. It creates this sense that you’re part of the scenery.” Might Rotterdam audiences feel the urge themselves? “That would be the ideal, if we broke on through to the other side and people thought, ‘Yeah!

Why not?’ Let’s celebrate sexuality.”

Career climax

Klinger acknowledges that some Boca films have misogynistic elements. “Brazil is still a pretty retrograde culture in terms of how women are treated – also homosexuals, blacks, different social classes – so you see a lot of horrible depictions. But they’re more honest as cultural documents. Most of the films that get shown at festivals like Rotterdam have some kind of introspective or critical outlook. You don’t usually

Awakening of the Beast

get to see a film that embodies the biases and prejudices of a culture. If we cut ourselves off from that, we don’t really know what’s out there and we become poorer as spectators.”

By the late 1980s, Boca filmmaking was in decline.

Cheaply imported American titles dominated and the market for sexually explicit titles had shrunk to “a bunch of perverts in trenchcoats,” as Klinger puts it.

“These films were part of a zeitgeist. In the late 1970s, sex in film was a novelty. Couples were going to theatres, people were really curious. By the mid-1980s, it was just smutty crap. Also, politics were more lenient by then,” so there was less demand for on-screen escape.

The Mouth of Garbage provides a chance for audiences to revisit that era – as well as some unexpected pleasures for Klinger, whose duties included translating the absurd comedy Sit on Mine and I’ll Enter

THE ART OF CRITICAL CINEMA Independent cinema is essential for a free society. Development organisation Hivos supports independent filmmakers all over the world. The Tiger Awards Competition puts upcoming talent in the spotlight and gives artists a powerful voice, even in countries where freedom is not self-evident. Hivos takes pride in sponsoring the Tiger Awards. Visit us at hivos.nl

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Lilian M.: Confidential Report

Yours, which features a head-mounted penis and other unusual organs. “This will be the pinnacle of my life as a subtitler,” he notes, “having to subtitle talking vaginas and anuses. Everything will be downhill from here…”