Despite fevered speculation to the contrary, George Clooney never actually showed up at the 35th Rotterdam Film Festival - not even at the showing of his excellent new film Good Night, and Good Luck which closed the 10-day event on Sunday, 5th February. Then again, Rotterdam - unlike its rival festivals at Berlin, Cannes and Venice - has never been much impressed by Hollywood glamour.

Indeed, even if the elusive Mr C had deigned to turn up in person, many Rotterdam attendees wouldn't have thought twice about knocking him over in their rush to see Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Chinese wunderkind Jia Zhang Ke, or legendary Czech animator Jan Svankmajer in person. All three turned up at various stages during this latest 'International Film Festival Rotterdam' (IFFR) - the latter being greeted by teary-eyed uber-fan Terry Gilliam, himself in town to promote his controversial new feature Tideland.

But while it's careful to venerate established talent (of suitably highbrow ilk), Rotterdam has always been primarily about new discoveries and fresh faces: for a decade the main section has been a showcase of films and first or second-time directors, competing for the three Tiger Awards of equal value (E 10,000) and prestige. And this year the Tiger-lineup selectors found one real gem in unheralded Shanghai-born 28-year-old Ying Liang, whose debut feature Taking Father Home breathed remarkably fresh life into a seemingly hackneyed plot.

Filmed for almost nothing with a borrowed camera and featuring a cast almost entirely made up of friends and relatives of Ying (in China, as in Japan and other East Asian countries, surnames come first) and his producer/creative-partner Peng Shan, Taking Father Home is the story of a teenager (Xu Yun) from a remote village who travels to the big city of Zigong with no money and a brace of ducks in a basket on his back. His mission: to find and retrieve his errant father, who walked out on his family six years before.

Yun learns an awful lot very quickly once he arrives in Zigong, as there's no shortage of mentor-figures eager to impart advice. His is a compelling quest, and we're with him every step of the way thanks to Ying's remarkable evocation of Zigong's sights, smells and sounds: if this weren't enough, he somehow manages to express the mood and character of an entire culture with just the simplest of touches and what seems to be the most basic of dialogue. By the end, Taking Father Home has become an utterly engaging emotional experience, and Ying has established himself as one of world cinema's most remarkable and promising young talents. You'll be hearing much more of and from him in years to come.

For this reviewer, Taking Father Home was comfortably the best of the 14 films in competition - but Tribune's three "runners up" weren't exactly shabby: Alex Dos Santos's Glue, a loose, atmospheric (if overlong) chronicle of disaffected, rock-music-loving Argentinian youth in small-town Patagonia; Frank Guerin's A Summer Day, in which the death of a teenage footballer has unexpected repercussions for his family, friends, and parish council; and Claudia Llosa's Madeinusa, a deceptively slow-burning drama set in an ultra-remote Peruvian village which skilfully combines elements of The Wicker Man, Dogville and classic film noir.

The Tiger jury, however, managed to overlook each of these strong candidates (yes, including Ying) in favour of Manhattan-based Kelly Reichardt's barely-there rural two-hander Old Joy (starring legendary cult singer-songwriter Will Oldham in a rare acting role); Manuel Nieto Zas's low-key The Dog Pound (in which a slacker Uruguayan twentysomething is prodded out of fecklessness by his no-nonsense businessman dad); and - the weakest of the three - Han Jie's Walking on the Wild Side, an ostentatiously bleak, morally-dubious tale of violent young hoodlums in an industry-blighted Chinese mining village.

Though nothing special, the Jia Zhang Ke-produced Walking on the Wild Side was nevertheless very far from being the worst title in competition: near-unanimous consensus awarded British-based American writer-director Robert Edwards' Land of the Blind an especially mouldy wooden spoon. The "film" - whose presence in competition was, frankly, an embarrassment to all concerned - is a crass spoof of totalitarianism wasting the valuable time of Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland, not to mention that of the poor Rotterdam audiences who had to endure its sophomoric excesses.

Despite this nadir, the Tigers were on the whole reckoned a solid crop - but audiences and critics alike were heard persistently grumbling at the spread of titles showing out of competition, especially those of us who'd already seen the impressive likes of Good Night and Good Luck, Hidden, Working Man's Death, Brokeback Mountain and 13/Tzameti (not to mention the single best 'item' of the entire event, Bill Daniel's superb 56-minute hobo-graffiti documentary Who Is Bozo Texino? which I caught at Vienna's film festival last October and was ludicrously hidden among the shorts here).

IFFR had previously been noted for showcasing the more extreme end of the East Asian spectrum - often in the gore-splattered strand charmingly entitled Rotterdammerung. Said strand had been snipped away for the latest version - leaving horror and other "genre" cinema frustratingly thin on the ground. Indeed, it's telling that the main "horror" draw at this film festival wasn't actually a feature-film at all: Joe Dante's Homecoming was made for the cable-TV series Masters of Horror, and is a deliriously full-blooded political satire which left the Rotterdam audiences clutching their splitting sides while gasping at the script's no-hold-barred audacity.

A casual remark by the (unseen, unnamed) American president about how he wishes all fatally wounded soldiers could return home to their families leads to chaos when scores of dead GIs emerge from their body-bags, determined to make their voices heard. This spells big trouble for the administration - until a particularly fiendish spin-doctor (whose resemblance to Karl Rove is entirely accidental) finds a way to turn crisis into opportunity. George Romero made no bones about the topical, political subtexts of last year's zombie-epic Land of the Dead: and Dante takes the concept much further - all the way to its logical, bloody and horrifying conclusion.

There's just room to pass on a few quick recommendations: Jim Finn's Interkosmos (USA) is a delightfully delicate mid-length faux-documentary about a 1970s Communist plan to colonise Ganymede and Titan; Lino Brocka's full-tilt melodrama Insiang (Philippines) from 1976, easily the pick of the festival's retrospective/classic selections; Miike Takashi's characteristically demented two-hour kidpic The Great Yokai War; and a pair of titles from American 'mainstream mavericks' in Tommy Lee Jones's directorial debut The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (though I counted only two) and Bubble, a hairshirt act of low-budget atoment from Steven Soderbergh after Ocean's Twelve and its Clooney-centric decadent excesses.

Neil Young

for TRIBUNE magazine