Daily Tiger #7 Eng

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DAILY TIGER

NEDERLANDSE EDITIE Z.O.Z

38TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM #7 WEDNESDAY 28 JANUARY 2009

photo: Bram Belloni

Toast of the town: “Doing instead of talking is the Rotterdam approach,” explained Rik Grashof, Rotterdam’s Alderman of Culture (second left) to guests at Monday evening’s IFFR Buyers and Sellers Dinner. An avowed cinema fan, Grashof pointed out he would have to skip dessert so as not to miss the screening of Kora-Eda Hirokazu’s Still Walking. Hosted by the City of Rotterdam and IFFR, the function was attended by 140 guests including leading Dutch and international producers, financiers and distributors. NC

THE CAR’S THE STAR Czech veteran Jan Nemec recalls the Prague Spring for his autobiographical film The Ferrari Dino Girl. By Wendy Mitchell Czech legend Jan Nemec chose Rotterdam for the world premiere of his new fi lm The Ferrari Dino Girl, because, he says “Rotterdam is for discovering new talent in world fi lm, ha ha!” That is of course a joke, for Nemec is a long-established talent and a key figure from the Czech New Wave, with features such as Diamonds of the Night and A Report on the Party and the Guests. The 72-year-old director, in a phone conversation from Prague, praised Holland for being supportive of him when he was just starting out. “My international career started in the early 1960s when I was in Amsterdam for a student fi lm festival, and that was my fi rst international award (for his graduation fi lm from Prague’s FAMU fi lm school, A Loaf of Bread). That was the time of deep Communism, so I got a lot of respect after this prestigious prize. I had my fi rst fi lm in Amsterdam and so my last could be in Rotterdam”, he says, but adding “I hope this is not my last fi lm.” FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHT The director himself is sorry not to be attending IFFR. But he had two heart surgeries last year and couldn’t risk traveling because of the flu spreading through Europe. Even without the director present, the world premiere tonight will be one of the highlights of IFFR 2009; a project impressive for

Jan Nemec (second left) in The Ferrari Dino Girl

its moving personal remembrances, experimentations with form and historical importance. The Ferrari Dino Girl links a series of autobiographical stories: starting in 1968, Nemec shot incendiary footage of the Soviet invasion of Prague, and wanted to get this shown internationally – taking the fi lm canisters to cross the border to Vienna with an Italian man and a Bardot-esque Czech woman, Jana.

The idiosyncratic project is both a historical document containing his famous footage of 1968, and an artistic contemporary revisiting of the past through newly shot images. (Karel Roden plays the director, mostly heard through voiceover narration.) RESTORED FOOTAGE Nemec was inspired to make The Ferrari Dino Girl when he was able to acquire his original

footage from 1968 from Austrian television. “The original footage I shot in 1968 has been shown hundreds of times, but I never got the credit or money from this material,” Nemec says. “It was also used for propaganda purposes and for a lot of commercial companies. Once I got it, I just wanted to pick up the negative and make it into something, just this little story.” The project builds on his other recent autobiographical projects Late Night Talks With Mother (2001) and Landscape of My Heart (2004). The original footage was in better-than-expected condition – “It was very complicated to fi nd it, but once I did, I was quite happy that it wasn’t destroyed or edited.” The footage, used in his lauded 1968 short documentary Oratorio For Prague, has been restored thanks to funding from the Czech government and now makes up a central part of The Ferrari Dino Girl. For the fi lm’s new material, Nemec returned to the actual locations from decades ago. “It’s like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime. Everything is authentic. History was me going back to ask the same questions,” says the director, who lived in exile in Germany and the US before returning to Prague in 1989. (continues on page 7)


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