DAILY TIGER
NEDERLANDSE EDITIE Z.O.Z
38TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM #5 MONDAY 26 JANUARY 2009
photo: Bram Belloni
Flashing the plastic: CineMart delegates Stephen Amis (Revolution Pictures) and Lynn Wilson (Pearl Productions) get into the swing at a cocktail party hosted by Telefilm Canada in the Jurriaanse Zaal in De Doelen on Sunday evening. For our continuing CineMart profiles, see page 9
Running with wolves Russian director Alexei Balabanov talks to Geoffrey Macnab about his revolutionary-era addiction-drama Morphia Russian cinema is very much in evidence in Rotterdam this year. This weekend saw premieres of two important new Russian features: Andrey Khrzhanovsky’s Room and a Half (inspired by the life of poet Joseph Brodsky) and Alexei Balabanov’s Morphia. However, the festival is lucky to have any Russian filmmakers in town to accompany their movies at all.
As Balabanov explains, securing a visa from the Dutch to attend IFFR was a daunting business. We’re used to countless spy movies from the Cold War era, in which Soviet bureaucrats stop Russians from traveling abroad. In Room and a Half, we see Brodsky’s parents forlornly trying to get official permission to visit their son in the US. The irony today – as Balabanov discovered during his recent dealings with the Dutch Consulate in St Petersburg – is that the Russians aren’t the ones curbing their citizens’ movements. “They (the Russians) let us out but you (the West) won’t let us in!” He speaks in bemusement of the many hours his wife spent in queues at the Consulate trying to get documents so the Balabanovs could come to Holland. “This is fascism. This is more than [the] KGB.” Despite his Kafka-esque encounter with the Dutch
Alexei Balabanov
photo: Felix Kalkman
consulate in St Petersburg (they almost refused him a visa to travel), Balabanov eventually made it to the Netherlands. The Russian director was in meditative mood as he discussed his new feature. Morphia is adapted from Mikhail Bulgakov’s semiautobiographical short story collection Notes of a
Young Doctor. Set in 1917, at the time of the Russian Revolution, it follows the experiences of Dr Polyakov, a brilliant young doctor working in a hospital in a remote provincial town, who succumbs to morphine addiction. Like most other Balabanov films, Morphia has split opinion in Russia. “I think it’s too sharp… explosive, hard,” the Russian director (a former interpreter) states, apologizing for his rusty English. The film is based on a screenplay by Sergei Bodrov, Jr – the young Russian actor/writer who was killed seven years ago in an avalanche. Bodrov wrote the screenplay in the mid-1990s. Initially, Balabanov was skeptical about the prospects for making Morphia. “It was very, very expensive and, at that time, our company didn’t have money for this large project. We couldn’t afford it,” Balabanov recalls. On one level, Morphia is his tribute to Bordrov, his friend and frequent collaborator. “But if it was only this, I wouldn’t have made the film.” The director strikes a pessimistic note about the continuing problem of piracy in the Russian industry. “Nothing has changed,” he laments. The one difference now is that the piracy is done by computer rather than through making video copies. While Balabanov accepts that it is easier to get projects like Morphia into production than when
Bodrov first wrote the screenplay, he argues that it remains as hard as ever to recoup the money. People first Balabanov’s recent films have dealt with seismic moments in Russian political and social history. Morphia is set at the time of the Revolution. His previous feature, Cargo 200, unfolded in the mid1980s, as the USSR entered its death throes. It portrayed a society that seemed sick to its roots, with alcoholism, violence and exploitation seemingly endemic. The title came from the name given to the bodies of dead Russians flown home from the war in Afghanistan. War (2002), meanwhile, was about a brutal kidnapping during the Chechen war. Despite these films’ settings, the director insists that he is not a political filmmaker. “I watch news, I have my point of view but I don’t participate.” Political films, he adds, are usually “very boring… I make films about people.” Balabanov is fully aware of the depth of suffering in today’s Russia. During the 1980s, when he was assistant director at Sverdlovsk Film Studio, he traveled widely through the country in preparation for a new movie. “I moved everywhere. I just saw everything.” He encountered alcoholism, starvation and utter squalor. He argues that for poor Russians living outside the big cities, nothing has changed. (continues on page 5)
GUEST COLUMN
Touching from a distance Self-styled ‘story architect’ (and CineMart attendee) Lance Weiler on why technology makes him feel more connected
I don’t consider myself a filmmaker anymore. I rarely shoot on film, don’t cut on film and often my work is shown digitally. I’m not sure what the new term will be, but I feel more like a story architect. As people become more connected thanks to technology, I find myself drawn to making stories social – social in the sense that they can bring people together and hopefully inspire an individual to pass them on to another. The concept of letting audience members step into the shoes of a protagonist – or any character for that matter – is incredibly exciting to me. My work has become a fusion of film, gaming, tech and design. I create a project universe where stories are meant to have multiple touch points, where the audience can enter, add to the experience and exit only to return again. In the work that we’ve done in this emerging area, we’ve seen audiences spend on average eight to ten hours a week with our stories. Audiences have extended the worlds we build by writing fan fiction, creating characters, remixing media, all the while spreading story elements across the web and into the real world. In one instance a couple met through the storyworld we created and got married! If that’s not social engagement I don’t know what is. My newest project, entitled HIM and participating in CineMart, is designed to be a film, series, game and social experience. The design and build is being handled by the company I co-founded, called Seize The Media. STM has built these types of experiences for our own original content, as well as for clients such as Ubisoft, myspace, CAA and others. Our approach to crafting a project universe or storyworld is very calculated. Each element is designed to serve the story and its characters while taking into consideration the best ways to foster audience engagement. This trans-media / cross-media approach is mirroring a change in audience habits. The audience is evolving. They are their own media companies. They can publish text, audio and video to global audiences at the push of a button. Whether anyone is watching is a different story; but the tools and desire to create are there. Trans-media offers many benefits to filmmakers in the sense that it can offset costs around production, generate awareness, drive traffic and increase the life of a film beyond its initial release. This is not theory – it is actually happening.
Remembrance of things past An original approach to historical subject matter distinguishes the work of Paulo Benvenuti. As IFFR pays tribute to this neglected Italian master, Mary Wood discusses his controversial 2003 film Segreti di Stato
Born in Tuscany in 1946, Paolo Benvenuti has made thirteen films since 1969, about half of them shorts. His profile as a director, writer and producer is typical of a kind of personal and alternative filmmaking practice in Italy, whereby the director’s desire to maintain as much control as possible over his film coincides with the necessities of low-budget filmmaking. This type of filmmaking depends on a slow burn (and sometimes extremely slow burn) of exposure at film festivals in the hope of attracting critical attention (which makes the IFFR’s celebration of Benvenuti’s career all the more apt). Slow burner It has been a very slow burn for Benvenuti. Working in documentaries throughout the 1970s, and influenced by the rigorous film style of Jean-Marie Straub, Benvenuti completed his first feature in 1988: the ten-year-in-the-making Judas’ Kiss (which re-examines Judas’ relationship to Jesus). Growing critical recognition accompanied his steady output. Tiburzi, his 1996 portrait of the 19th-century Tuscan brigand, was in competition in Locarno, as was Gostanza da Libbiano, his 2000 drama about a witchcraft trial which won the Swissair Special Prize and the Youth Jury Prize. Benvenuti’s creative profile had now increased to the extent that his next project, Segreti di Stato (Secret File, Italy, 2003) was made by one of Italy’s most important producers, Domenico Procacci of Fandango. Segreti di Stato is Benvenuti’s best known film. It is a reconstruction of the events surrounding a massacre of peasants and workers in Sicily in 1947. In choosing this subject, Benvenuti returns to the terrain explored by the master of Italian critical realism, Francesco Rosi, in his Salvatore Giuliano (Italy, 1961) – and much less successfully by Michael Cimino in The Sicilian (USA, 1987), starring Christopher Lambert in a long coat. Beyond establishing the collusion between Sicilian separatist Giuliano’s gang, the mafia, and the forces of the Italian state in the death of Giuliano, Rosi’s film could not name names higher up in the Italian political system. Benvenuti’s film makes the same point, but uses the figure of an investigating lawyer and an old Sicilian communist to construct a network of links to the upper echelons of the Christian Democrat party, including Giulio
Segreti di Stato
Andreotti – at that time Secretary to Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi. Andreotti is the subject of Paolo Sorrentino’s Il divo (Italy/France, 2008), also playing at IFFR. DRAWING OUT THE TRUTH Segreti di Stato therefore draws on a rich seam of intrigue and corruption in Italian civic life, and uses the drama-documentary techniques to reconstruct events and establish responsibility and blame. Benvenuti uses the figure of a technical expert in ballistics, and a large plaster model of the terrain, complete with flashing lights, to test out hypotheses. Newspapers, photographs and what seems to be newsreel footage of Giuliano are also used. The film also uses the conventions of American and Italian film noir to indicate that there are further mysteries to uncover. Most innovatively, Benvenuti uses pencil drawings in the lawyer’s sketchbook to illustrate what characters are saying. This might be the director’s strategy to conceal the lack of budget, but the sketches also evoke the dramatic style of Italian comic strip gialli,
Mary P Wood is Professor of European Cinema at Birkbeck, University of London, and author of Italian Cinema and Contemporary European Cinema. Segreti di Stato Paolo Benvenuti Zaal De Unie Tue 27 Jan 19:45 Cinerama 4 Fri 30 Jan 20:15 See programme for details of other Benvenuti screenings.
The history man Paolo Benvenuti talks to Gaetano Maiorino There is a great deal of preparation and research behind all your work.
Basically I’m a historian, so my real job is the research. Then the medium through which I chose to divulge my research is making films. Why are you drawn to the subjects you make films about?
So you change the usual point of view
Yes, by changing the point of view, you change the meaning of a story – and provide a different perspective on history; I do that in all my films. I learned it from the great Italian director Roberto Rossellini: I asked him how to know where to put the camera and he told me the best position is the
I’m a curious person; mostly when faced with facts that are not completely clear. Everything according to me has an origin, but we often don’t really know what it is. For example, everyone talks about the Mafia, but no one knows how and where it was born. The same happened with Jesus: his way of life and his message have conditioned, and still condition our lives, our mentality. I made a trilogy about that subject – Judas’ Kiss (Il bacio di Giuda), Confortorio and Gostanza da Libbiano – which explains how Jesus’ teaching has been completely twisted by ecclesiastical hierarchy. How do you choose how to start when telling a story?
HIM
harking back to this popular national tradition. The first film of Benvenuti’s to receive a nationwide Italian release, Segreti di Stato was soon withdrawn from distribution after a question was asked about it in the Italian parliament. The incident points up Benvenuti’s gift for making history uncomfortably relevant, and the revival of the film at IFFR affirms the importance of this remarkable filmmaker.
It’s always from a lateral point of view. I usually tell small stories to explain bigger stories – so I depict Judas to talk about Jesus, or Dora [Puccini’s maid] to talk about Puccini, and the repentant Pisciotta to talk about the Mafia.
Gostanza da Libbiano
38TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com
one that allows the audience to get the most information from a scene. And that became my point of view in all my films; I always try to give as much information as I can. Did the cooperation with Paola Baroni, who co-directs your last three movies, change your approach to filmmaking?
No, not so much. My career can be divided into three periods: during the first, from 1968 to 1983, I shot 16mm movies and the camera operator was my father, an Italian documentary director from the 1940s, so the films I made were the result of combined work often done after very strong discussions and arguments. Starting from Il Cartapestaio, a 10-minute short, I started working by myself. I started working on a project, Il bacio di Giuda, a 35mm film that took me ten years to complete, and that was the beginning of the second period, during which I made the trilogy I mentioned earlier. The third period coincides with my cooperation with Paola Baroni. Thanks to her, there is more attentiont to female characters in my latest films; they’re deeper and have a very strong personality, for example in Gostanza da Libbiano and in Puccini e la fanciulla. We argue very much, but at the end we always find good solutions together, and our personal work always has a perfect symmetry.
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Student bus passes In September 2009, Hasse van Nunen hopes to board a bus in the Netherlands, armed with an inflatable screen, and set off on an 8-month round-trip through Europe to present – and collect en route – the best of the continent’s student-film output, she tells Nick Cunningham. Her rolling Breaking Ground Film Festival will conclude in Utrecht in July 2010, with a 4-day extravaganza during which the top of the student crop will be programmed. Stopoff points along the way will include the student film fests at Potsdam, Poitiers, Bologne and Belgrade. “We’re setting up the festival as we don’t think that there are enough places for students to show their work,” Van Nunen says. “So many film festivals are so big, and this is a great way for student filmmakers to meet each other before they enter the real world.” Van Nunen, who graduated from Utrecht University in the summer, is in Rotterdam to raise finance and sponsorship for the venture which is budgeted at €400,000. “What we want to achieve ultimately is an easier way to get co-operation happening between students and to create a place where people can show their work, meet each other and have a good time,” she avers.
(continued from page 1) Animated tails The Russian director doesn’t much like discussing future projects. However, he does admit to having one long-cherished project – an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Camera Obscura (Nabokov’s 1932 novel which deals with some of the same themes as Lolita). There are rights issues still to be resolved, but this a film he yearns to make. Balabanov admits he was thrown when one journalist asked if Cargo 200 – one of his most unremittingly bleak efforts – was a comedy. With its absurdist moments, scenes of voyeurism and occasional moments of slapstick, Morphia appears to have a strong comic undertow. Is the humour deliberate? “I don’t know. I try to make a film as open as possible.” The Russian director does admit to a certain pride in the scenes in Morphia in which we see the young doctor’s carriage pursued across a snowstorm by a pack of wolves. For audiences, it is impossible to see the joints between the live action and the digital effects. “The wolves, most of them, were computer wolves but two dogs are real,” he explains. “But their tails were computer animated.” Balabanov has described Morphia as a film “about a brilliant man who goes down.” This is a fate that is highly unlikely to befall the filmmaker himself – he has now made more than a dozen features, and doesn’t seem to be slowing. Certain Russian critics have interepreted Morphia as an allegory about the disappearance of ‘the intellectuals’ in post-revolutionary Russia. Predictably, the director doesn’t endorse such a reading, even if he doesn’t dismiss it out of hand either. “When you make a film, even if you don’t mean it, it [these ideas] exists in the air. It exists around you. It existed in Bulgakov’s stories.”
Morphia
Farewell but not Goodbye This will be the last Rotterdam Film Festival for Bianca Taal – at least in her capacity as Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) chief, Nick Cunningham reports
On March 1, she will take up the position of cohead of programmes at Amsterdam’s Binger Filmlab, where she will join former CineMart boss, and current Binger director, Ido Abram. After initially working as a volunteer for the boxoffice team, Taal immersed herself more fully into the IFFR set-up in 2000 when she took on part-time intern duties, while simultaneously studying film at Utrecht University. She started off as assistant to former HBF head Marianne Bhalotra, before moving across to head up the CineMart with Marit van den Elshout following Abram’s departure in 2004. After Bhalotra’s retirement in 2006, Taal took over the reins at the Hubert Bals Fund. “Initially, I felt a great weight of responsibility taking over something that was already established and that had been maintained so well,” she stresses. “It was very exciting but at the same time I was a little nervous, but it was a great privilege to be part of something so essential to filmmakers from around the world who need support. “Although our funding is relatively modest, we are still very much involved and care deeply about how the whole film comes together,” she continues. “We feel a very close bond with the films and you grow a lot with the filmmakers. And it is wonderful to see these films that we have assessed on paper finally coming to life.”
As an intern, Taal remembers the long correspondences she maintained with novice filmmakers whose films went on to enjoy much international success. “It has been wonderful to see their careers develop; filmmakers such as Carlos Reygadas [Japón, 2002], Diego Lerman [Tan de Repente, 2003] and Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll, the team behind 25 Watts [2001].” When asked what she feels she has achieved during her tenure at the festival, Taal points out that she is happy to leave the Fund in very good financial shape, having gained an assurance of ongoing longterm support from the Ministry of Foreign Aid. “I
am very happy with this recent news, as the future looked bleak when I took over two years ago. “What will be really nice is to take the experience I gained both at the Fund and at CineMart and apply it to my work at the Binger, where I will be working very closely with the filmmakers in residency. I think that’s a nice next step. Here, we feel very closely connected to the film projects that we support. At the Binger, I’ll be able to follow very closely the development of the projects over the course of five months. Rotterdam and the Binger are both part of the same filmmaking family,” she concludes.
Bianca Taal
photo: Ruud Jonkers
FILMMuseum pick-ups
El Dorado
One trend is obvious at this year’s IFFR: the Amsterdam Filmmuseum is taking an increasingly active role in arthouse distribution in the Netherlands. Geoffrey Macnab reports
There are nine titles in this year’s IFFR programme that the Filmmuseum will be releasing theatrically later this year. These range from experimental fare like Gustav Deutsch’s FILM IST. a girl and a gun to Bouli Lanners’ crowd-pleaser El Dorado. Meanwhile, the Filmmuseum’s acquisitions team is continuing to pick up new films, including Peter Strickland’s Berlinale competition entry, Katalin Varga. Head of acquisitions Rene Wolf explains the Filmmuseum’s buying strategy. “We are mainly there to buy the films that without our support would not make it to distribution in the Netherlands. We are not really in competition [with other distributors],” Wolf states. However, with arthouse distribution in the Netherlands not exactly flourishing, it has often been left to the Filmmuseum to ensure that Dutch audiences have the chance to see new work by Rotterdam favourites like Kornel Mundruczo, Carlos Reygaras, Cristi Puiu, Hou Hsiao Hsien, and many others. Filmmuseum acquires Benelux rights for selected titles in partnership with Belgian distributor, Lumiere. (For example, Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Still
Walking and Strickland’s Katalin Varga were both bought jointly.) Wolf points out that Filmmuseum’s distribution team is not in a position to pay big minimum guarantees to sales agents. Around €30,000 is the maximum it is likely to pay for Benelux rights for a new acquisition. (It would usually hope to pay less.) Nor is the Filmmuseum looking to steal market share from commercial distributors. “Since we are a foundation, we don’t really need to make a profit. We simply can’t afford to lose too much money on a single title.” The strategy is to balance the line-up between likely money spinners and films that aren’t obvious crowd-pleasers. “We try to finance the more difficult titles with the successes.” Filmmuseum releases fifteen to twenty titles a year. This includes films from “masters of cinema” and restorations (for example, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Brief Encounter), as well as new features from first or second time directors. It will put out films on between one and eight prints. Historically, The Filmmuseum has always had close links with Rotterdam. If anything, these links are closer than ever under present director, (former IFFR boss) Sandra den Hamer. However, Wolf and his team have to be careful not to acquire too many Rotterdam titles – otherwise, their ability to buy films elsewhere will be reduced. Meanwhile, the aim
38TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com
is to release the IFFR titles soon after the Festival, so that the films can capitalize on the buzz they’ve generated in Rotterdam.
Dioraphte goes public People power will be more in evidence at the festival this year, as cinema audiences are asked to determine the winner of the €10,000 Dioraphte Award, to be awarded to one of the 33 Hubert Bals Fund-supported films in official selection. Last year’s award, decided by jury, was given to Sandra Kogut for Mutum (Brazil). “We are excited to present the Dioraphte Award this year for a second time,” comments Hubert Bals Fund manager Bianca Taal. “The Dioraphte Foundation supports cultural and artistic projects both in the Netherlands and internationally, and is a partner of the Hubert Bals Fund. The decision to make it an audience award this year will definitely contribute to giving the Hubert Bals Fund films an even higher profile within the festival.” NC
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VPRO Tiger Awards Competition
VPRO Tiger Awards Competition
Shaggy dog story
Braving the waves
Tiger competitor Dogging: A Love Story finds romance in an unlikely setting. Its UK director Simon Ellis discusses his feature debut with Wendy Mitchell
Iranian director Ramtin Lavafipour talks about mixing documentary and fiction in his Tiger competitor, Be Calm and Count to Seven. By Wendy Mitchell
It’s quite telling that Simon Ellis’s debut feature has a two-part title: Dogging: A Love Story. The story lives up to its name, with a sweet modern romance set among the rather salacious world of ‘dogging’. For those who don’t know, that’s nothing to do with canines – it’s a subculture of people who like to watch other people have sex in cars. “This duality was definitely something that attracted me to the project,” says UK-based director Ellis, who shot the film in Newcastle. “Dogging and love hardly roll off the tongue together and that contradiction was instantly appealing. By the same token, I was interested in developing the oxymoron further by shooting it in a classical way.” Luke Treadaway, best known as one of the conjoined twins in Brothers of the Head, gives a charismatic performance in the lead role of Dan, a likeable aspiring journalist who wants to write about the dogging phenomenon – while also looking for love. “[Dan] was a difficult character to pull off, because he is relatively ‘straight’ in comparison to some of the lively ensemble surrounding him,” Ellis explains. “Despite Dan’s character being a fish out of water, I absolutely didn’t want a goofy Ben Stiller performance under any circumstances. It had to be played straight. There are some great understated beats of humour from him in the film.” Indeed the film – a world premiere in the VPRO Tiger Awards Competition – balances some wicked humour with more tender moments. The score also brings out the emotions. “I originally planned not to use any music in the film, but soon adopted a classical score that reinforced the visual intent and represented the ‘love story’ part of the title, in a traditional sense,” Ellis says.
Iranian director Ramtin Lavafipour wanted to bring the truthful storytelling his documentary background has given him to his first narrative feature, Be Calm and Count to Seven. The whole film was inspired by his visit to southern Iran, when he saw speedboats heading for the beach and people fleeing from the boats after gunshots were heard. “It was a scene I kept remembering and it made me write this script,” he says. The scene now appears in the middle of the film, which is the simple but powerful story of a boy from a remote fishing village who fears his father is dead after he doesn’t return from a smuggling mission. “Every scene in the film I experienced with these people. I stayed with them a few months, I went smuggling with them. Yes, you can sit at your desk in Tehran and write a script, but it wouldn’t be as good as I wanted it to be,” says the writer/director/ producer. The feeling of authenticity is furthered by using mostly non-professional actors. Casting the young boy to play Motu was crucial. “I invited 200 or 300 children to the casting, but somehow my eyes were locked on one boy,” Lavafipour remembers. “He was sitting staring at me, and when he stood up I knew he was the one I was looking for. I just said ‘He’s the one we’re using, we don’t even have to test him.’” The boy, 13-year-old Omid Abdollahi, had never even seen a camera before, but this wasn’t a problem for the director. “With all the non-professional actors, I just never tell them about the script. I just guide the actor to come close to what I intend for the film, but without letting him know it’s something I need,” he says. Much of the action takes place on boats crossing
Simon Ellis
Ellis is excited for his world premiere in Rotterdam. “Screening my first feature is very much like when I screened my first short, all those years ago,” he says of his 1996 short, Thicker Than Water. Indeed, he’s become a festival darling over the years, and his 2006 short won more than 35 awards and played at IFFR in 2008. “I’ve attended many festivals and don’t really get nervous now, but something tells me that this is going to be an exception because there is more at stake, for more people,” the director says. Dogging: A Love Story Simon Ellis Pathé 5 Mon 26 Jan 21:45 Pathé 5 Tue 27 Jan 13:15 Cinerama 3 Wed 28 Jan 11:45 * Pathé 3 Thu 29 Jan 13:30 Pathé 5 Sat 31 Jan 10:30 * Press and Industry screening
choppy waters, making for some very striking visuals. “I have camera experience myself, so I went out for a few days to experience shooting on the water,” Lavafipour adds. “That way I knew what would happen when we were shooting on the boats.” The director is not limiting himself to only fiction or documentaries in the future, and sees them as mutual interests. He says: “My documentaries have fiction elements and my fiction gets very close to documentary.” Be Calm and Count To Seven Ramtin Lavafipour Pathé 4 Mon 26 Jan 19:00 Pathé 4 Tue 27 Jan 10:15 Cinerama 2 Wed 28 Jan 09.45 * Pathé 4 Thu 29 Jan 21:30 Pathé 4 Sat 31 Jan 10:15 * Press and Indsutry screening
Ramtin Lavafipour
photo: Bram Belloni
Ordinary People
Young at heart
Slovenian filmmaker Vlado Skafar tells Yaona Pavlova about the struggle to make his experimental documentary Letter to a Child
Alexis Dos Santos talks to Brandon Harris about his international premiere of Unmade Beds
Letter to a Child
Letter to a Child is a documentary directed by Vlado Skafar (also known for co-founding the Slovenian Cinematheque and organizing the Isola Cinema Film Festival in Ljubljana). As he states, he is not a storyteller, but rather an observer; in his second feature he therefore allows ordinary people, at different stages of their lives, to talk about their experience of love, parenthood and death. The project had to be postponed for several years due to the lack of funding from Slovenian sources. The producer and the director therefore decided to start shooting with their own money. “We thought that we could manage with everything and we would need only a cameraman, so we borrowed the equipment and started looking for stories. Then, after the shooting, we received financial support from the Slovenian Film Fund, which happened to be very useful in the post-production period.” So far, Letter to a Child was received very well at two local premiere screenings, so the movie will be of-
ficially released in April, along with a book the director started writing while waiting for funding. The text delivers the same idea as the movie, and will be published under the title Ordinary Conversations. “I also had this idea of travelling with the film on my own,” Skafar says, “visiting distant places and people who cannot go to cinemas anymore.” Skafar’s distribution plans echo the DIY ethos of his shoot, but also speak volumes about the difficulty of distributing a local movie in Slovenia; especially an experimental one. There was only one cinema club in Ljubljana – Kinodvor – but it remained closed for a long time, until the city’s new mayor decided to re-launch the initiative. “We can be optimistic, as we have a new government which I believe will encourage producers, and because there is a new Minister of Culture, Majda Sirca, who is one of the most famous cinema historians in our country,” says Skafar. But he introduces a note of caution: “I must say that I do not believe in national cinema. I think that having a New Wave is not a plan, it is a stroke of luck.”
Marking his return to Rotterdam this year is Alexis Dos Santos, whose debut feature Glue was in the VPRO Tiger Awards Competition in 2006 and who is back this year with Unmade Beds, making its international premiere at the festival. Like Glue, it’s about a young man’s rootlessness (and it this case, a young woman’s as well). Set in the hip areas of East London, it revolves around a pair of twenty-something Europeans – Spaniard Axl and Belgian Vera – who, although they don’t meet until the film’s final reel, share a sprawling flat with an assortment of other young, bohemian squatters. Featuring terrific performances from Deborah Francois and Fernando Tielve, the film, despite its wanderlust and visual poetry, is rooted in tales of the search for interconnection with and solace from others; in Axl’s case, it’s with a father who left him at a young age; in Vera’s, it’s sustainable intimacy with a lover. About his interest in tales of the young and unhinged, Dos Santos says “It’s something I
might grow out of in a few years time, but I’m still there. I don’t feel like, oh I’m a mature person, cause I’m not.” Unmade Beds had its world premiere at Sundance last week, where it received broad acclaim (“an intimate, tender feature” raved the New York Times). Sales agent Protagonist Pictures is currently involved in securing worldwide distribution for the film. Dos Santos is working on a script with a writing partner; one that we may see at next year’s CineMart. “Still young people, quite cosmopolitan, my usual milieu,” he says. “But in two cities this time, not just one.” Unmade Beds Alexis Dos Santos Doelen Willem Burgerzaal Mon 26 Jan 09:45 * Schouwburg Grote Zaal Wed 28 Jan 16:45 * Press and Industry screening Unmade Beds
Letter to a Child Vlado Skafar Cinerama 7 Mon 26 Jan 09:45 Lantaren 2 Wed 28 Jan 22:45 Pathé 6 Sat 31 Jan 22:00
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CineMart profile
FLANDERS IMAGE FLANDERS AUDIOVISUAL FUND AND
PROUDLY PRESENT THE
CINEMART 2009 PROJECTS
GALLOPING MIND D: WIM VANDEKEYBUS, P: BART VAN LANGENDONCK, SAVAGE FILM
Tiger in the Pocket Liew Seng Tat tells Wendy Mitchell why it’s time to stop festival-hopping and get back to work
Malaysian director Liew Seng Tat knows just how much a Tiger win can help a young filmmaker. After winning at IFFR 2008 for his debut feature Flower in the Pocket (which also won the New Currents Award in Pusan), the film was then invited to 40 or 50 more festivals. “Winning awards is always nice and it certainly helped,” the director says. “There were a lot more festivals chasing the film. I don’t have to knock on doors.” But Liew jokes now that the “glory is over” because he is hard at work finishing the first draft of his next screenplay, In What City Does It Live? This project was presented at CineMart last year, and won the €15,000 Prince Claus Film Fund Grant prize; it also has Hubert Bals Fund digital production funding. “[Winning last year’s Tiger] doesn’t mean you get automatic funding, people still want to see the screenplay,” Liew notes. He’s been writing the script during the past few months, while living in Paris as one of six directors in the Cannes Cinefondation Residence – a programme that also brings him to CineMart this year. He will return to Malaysia at the end of February, but says that the Parisian experience has been valuable. “Putting a few directors together is good, because everyone has the same mission and everyone gets inspired by each other,” he says. He plans to have the script ready to give to potential producers in the next month or two. His previous producer, Yen San Michelle Lo, is busy with family commitments, so he may be looking for a new producer. Da Huang Pictures, the Malaysian company he founded in 2004 with Tan Chui
Mui, Amir Muhammad and James Lee, is already on board. Liew says the budget will be less than E500,000, a larger budget than Flower in the Pocket. He calls In What City Does It Live, “a mixture of comedy and tragedy.” The plot follows a man who wants to give his daughter an old abandoned house as a wedding present – but first he has to relocate the house. The situation gets more complicated when an African immigrant hides in the house and is mistaken for a ghost. Also, his new short Chasing Cats and Cars is playing in the Spectrum: Shorts programme. Spectrum: Shorts Pathé 6 Tue 27 Jan 16:15 Cinerama 7 Wed 28 Jan 22:15
Liew Seng Tat
photo: Ruud Jonkers
CineMart profile
Three times a maid
LE MENSONGE
At CineMart, South Korean sales and distribution house Mirovision is pitching the remake of what has recently become one of the most sought-after films on the festival circuit. Nick Cunningham reports
D : DIMITRI KARAKATSANIS P : EURYDICE GYSEL, EPIDEMIC
ALSO IN PRE-PRODUCTION
After Kim Ki-young’s 1960 Korean classic The Housemaid was recommended by Martin Scorsese to the World Cinema Foundation for a €80,000 restoration grant in 2007, the restored print was presented to Cannes audiences in 2008, to great acclaim. The remake, to be directed by Gina Kim (Never Forever, 2007), will again detail the destabilizing influence that a housemaid exerts over an upper middleclass family in Korea. “At first, it was an artistic decision to remake the film,” points out Mirovision director Nicolas Piccato. “But after the restored original was screened at Cannes last year, we really saw the commercial potential of the project.” Piccato concedes that the question of where to place the film’s emphases has been the subject of much internal debate in Mirovision offices. “Of course, from an artistic point of view, I am worried, as the
22ND OF MAY D: KOEN MORTIER • P: EPIDEMIC
ANGEL HOUSE D: HANS HERBOTS • P: HET PRODUCTIEHUIS
BLANCO D: CHRISTOPHE VAN ROMPAEY • P: EPIDEMIC
THE FIELDS D: MICHAËL R. ROSKAM • P: SAVAGE FILM
HOW TO REWIND YOUR DOG D: JOHAN GRIMONPREZ • P: ZAPOMATIK
THE K. FILE D: JAN VERHEYEN • P: EYEWORKS FILM & TV
PORTABLE LIFE D: FLEUR BOONMAN • P: SAVAGE FILM
QUIXOTE’S ISLAND
original is such a masterpiece,” Piccato continues. “We believe there are three edges to the film: the thriller, the social and the psychological. As far as Gina and Mirovision are concerned, the emphasis will be on the thriller and social aspects of the project.” At CineMart, Piccato is keen to entice French and US co-production partners to board the project. He also confirms that Mirovision will handle world sales, but is open to the idea of selling on the European rights to a European partner. The choice of director was determined by what Piccato perceives to be a more international outlook within Kim’s work. “Gina is as much a US director as a Korean director,” he opines. “Using a purely Korean director may have been limiting in terms of the film’s international market potential. An international director will give the film a different edge and a very different angle.” Previous remake pitches at CineMart include those for the Theo van Gogh trilogy (Triple Theo) pitched by Ironworks Productions/Column productions and Jim Fall’s re-working of Pen-eh Ratanaruang’s 6ixtynin9. Both pitches were presented in 2005.
D: DIDIER VOLCKAERT • P: VIVI FILM
I’ll be Watching…
THE STEPPES D: VANJA D’ALCANTARA • P: LUNANIME
SWOONI D: KAAT BEELS • P: EYEWORKS FILM & TV
TURQUAZE (WORKING TITLE) D: KADIR BALCI • P: MENUET
AND MANY MORE...
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Konstantinos Kontovrakis, Athens-based international programmer for the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, thought it a bit obvious to recommend the only Greek film in the IFFR programme. But he was passionate enough about Anastas Charalampidis’ Ecce Momo! that he has to encourage people to see it. He calls this “a film you love to hate, you hate to love or hate and love at the same time. It’s not an experiment but an ultra-personal, egoistic, narcissistic, voyeuristic diary; so painfully personal and
absorbing that watching it feels at times like an exercise in patience sprinkled with fireworks of true brilliance. Not exactly your typical Greek film – not exactly your typical film in any case – but certainly the kind of film you want to watch in Rotterdam.” Ecce Momo! Anastas Charalampidis Lantaren 2 Wed 28 Jan 20:15
14-01-2009 15:31:06
38TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com
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