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American Combatant (USA) 4/10
The Autumn (USSR; 1974) 5/10
Bog of Beasts (Brazil) 6/10
Dog Days Dream (Japan) 7/10
Dong (China) 6/10
A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (USA) 7/10
INLAND EMPIRE (USA/Poland/France) 5/10 'surprise film'
Kinshasa Palace (Congo/France) 6/10
The Last Winter (USA/Iceland) 6/10
M (Japan) 6/10
Manufactured Landscapes (Canada) 6/10
Nightmare Detective (Japan) 5/10
Strawberry Shortcakes (Japan) 5/10
Syndromes and a Century (Thailand) 3/10
12:08 East of Bucharest (Romania) 8/10
The Unpolished (Germany) 7/10
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SAVE THE TIGER!
overview of the 2007 International Film Festival Rotterdam
[written Tribune magazine]
NOW well into its fourth decade, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) is firmly established as one of the biggest and most important events of its type - not just in Europe, but worldwide. Measured by "bums on seats", its 2007 tally of 367,000 ticket-sales puts it into the very top bracket of global film jamborees - alongside Berlin and Toronto - while in artistic terms the festival's traditional predilection for cutting-edge fare ensures it remains a fixture on the calendar of the most discerning and respected international critics.
But IFFR - its symbol and totem, a leaping, backward-looking tiger - isn't the only film festival to take place in this chilly Dutch city (Europe's largest port, and globally in the top three) during the final week of January and the first few days of February: 'R Eject' is a renegade counter-festival which started half a decade ago and in 2007 projected films digitally in ex-pharmacy adjoining a major IFFR venue. As its name suggests, R Eject shows the films IFFR turns down - and this year there were so many to choose from that R Eject introduced a selection policy for the very first time: (previously all IFFR rejectees were guaranteed a screening). This struck many IFFR attendees as a decidely ironic development, as their impression of the official festival was that selection criteria had been notably loosened for 2007 - in some cases, seemingly abandoned altogether.
IFFR now shows well over 200 feature films - plus at least as many shorts, not to mention the dizzying variety of experimental material that is, for the most part, only tangentially related to "conventional cinema." Rotterdam-based magazine Zone 5300 had four critics covering IFFR, from the first preliminary press screenings, through the entire duration of the event (24th Jan - 4th Feb) - and even they only managed to catch 55 movies between them (their pick: unheralded, anarchic, scatological Korean animation Aachi and Ssipak.)
This isn't just a Rotterdam problem, of course. It's become a familiar refrain among film professionals - critics and festival-programmers included - that there are simply too many films being made at the moment, and the explosion in numbers shows no signs of abating. If it isn't possible for them to keep track of the movie scene, what possible hope can the public have? The immediate result is that outstanding films can often get lost in the rush: two obvious examples at IFFR 2007 being Lisandro Alonso's mini-masterpiece Fantasma (from Argentina) and Ying Liang's outstanding The Other Half (China) - neither of which managed to obtain the exposure or coverage they so eminently deserved.
Fantasma is an hour-long exercise in challenging art-cinema: it "stars" the two protagonists from Alonso's previous (award-laden) films, La libertad and Los muertos, as they negotiate a multi-level Buenos Aires theatre-complex where a screening of the latter movie is taking place. Near-wordless but utterly compelling in its mastery of image and sound, Fantasma nimbly navigates the tricky line which separates true talent from mannered pretentiousness - confirming Variety magazine's assessment of Alonso as the "post and master" of the new Argentine cinema.
As chronicled in these pages exactly a year ago, Ying Liang's Taking Father Home was the discovery of IFFR 2006. The industrious Ying clearly doesn't believe in resting on his laurels, however, and back then was already working on his followup. The Other Half is a rather more ambitious affair, attempting to chronicle the state of modern China on both the micro (romantic and familial attachments) and macro (environmental and employment issues) level. A daunting task, but Ying - who works with absolutely minimal budgets and non-professional performers, but happens to have a terrific eye for composition and a great knack for accessible storytelling - carries it off admirably.
At 29, Ying (Chinese surnames come first) is arguably the most exciting young director in world cinema at the moment - which makes it all the more regrettable that he was (inexplicably) left off the list of films eligible for the IFFR's NETPAC Award, a prize designed to honour the best in Asian cinema. He suffered the same fate with Taking Father Home, and so it'll be understandable (if unfortunate) if he decides not to bring his next feature (which will either be The Missing House or Blown By the Typhoon) to Rotterdam. [NB : British audiences can catch up with Ying Liang's two features - plus Fantasma and Los muertos - at the upcoming Bradford International Film Festival, which runs from 9th to 24th March and for which the author of this report is international consultant.]
Other gems lurking in IFFR's hefty catalogue included a couple of striking debuts: from Japan, former standup comic Ichii Masahide's off-kilter two-hander Dog Days Dream; and, from Germany, Pia Marais' piercingly well-observed dysfunctional-family chronicle The Unpolished (the latter one of no less than four 'Tiger Award' winners in what was generally regarded as a sub-standard competition - a section reserved for first- and second-time directors).
At the other end of the experience scale, veteran American experimentalist James Benning was in town with both the remarkable Ten Skies (which does exactly what it says on the tin: ten static shots, lasting around ten minutes, of skies and clouds) and One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later. The latter is a fascinating, decade-hopping structuralist portrait of post-industrial Milwaukee spanning 1977 and 2004, composed of Benning's trademark static shots: the first hour shows sixty locations for a minute each, the second revisits them 27 years later - accompanied by the 1977 soundtrack.
Another example of gritty, 16mm-shot American experimenta was on show via the European premiere of Danielle Lombardi and Brigid McCaffrey's Lay Down Tracks, a beguilingly direct look at the lives of five ordinary US citizens whose jobs require them to do a lot of travelling - by boat, air, truck and train. Socio-economic and political considerations are present throughout, albeit largely in the form of unspoken undercurrents.
But such themes rise powerfully to the surface in another IFFR highlight, Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest, a brilliantly-structured black comedy in which a small-town TV station's chat-show analyses how the locality dealt with the Ceaucescu revolution of December 1989. Expect to see it at an arthouse cinema near you soon - likewise feature-debutant Dito Montiel's warm but emotionally harrowing tale of growing up in 1980s New York, the audaciously-autobiographical A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints: a title which, given the head-spinning plethora of material on view, could easily have applied to this year's IFFR catalogue...
Neil Young
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previously seen elsewhere:
9/10 : Lisandro Alonso's Fantasma
8/10 : YING Liang's The Other Half
8?/10: James Benning's Ten Skies
7/10 : Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth
7/10 : BONG Joon-Ho's The Host
7/10 : Lombardi & McCaffrey's Lay Down Tracks
7/10 : James Benning's One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later
6/10 : Pablo Trapero's Born and Bred
6/10 : Linda Hattendorf's The Cats of Mirikitani
6/10 : Christopher Nolan's The Prestige
6/10 : Luc Moullet's The Prestige of Death
6/10 : Jia Zhang-Ke's Still Life
5/10 : Albert Serra's Honor de Cavalleria
5/10 : Uruphong Rakasad's Stories from the North
4+?/10: Prasanna Jayakody's Sankara
4/10 : Radu Muntean's The Paper Will Be Blue
4/10 : Andrea Arnold's Red Road
3/10 : Penny Woolcock's Mischief Night
still online : Jigsaw Lounge's coverage of the 2006 IFFR |
