HUNTING THE TIGERS : Rotterdam awards speculation

Of all the major film festivals, Rotterdam’s competition section offers film-makers the best odds of success: from a field normally numbering around 15, three equal first prizes are bestowed, and in 2007 that figure went up to four. This year’s 14 contenders, all of whom are presenting their first or second works, therefore have a better than one-in-three chance of “victory”, and with no clear front-runners – not to mention an “eclectic” jury including Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, former Rotterdam chief Sandra Den Hamer and leading Argentinian auteur Lucrecia Martel – it’s tricky to predict who might come out on top in tonight’s awards (6pm Dutch time, at the old Luxor cinema.)

What seems almost certain is that at least one of the two South Korean candidates will be taking a Tiger prize back east, as both Yoon Sung-Hyun’s Bleak Night and Park Jung-Bum’s The Journals of Musan have proven popular with audiences and critics alike. Both are feature-film debuts, the highly assured and extremely well-acted teenage bullying/suicide saga Bleak Night being, somewhat remarkably, Yoon’s film-school graduation project, while Park had attracted attention for his 2008 short 125 Jeon Seung-Chul, upon which Musan (following the mishaps of a North Korean defector as he scrapes a living in a harshly impersonal, teeming Seoul) is based. He’s also worked as an assistant to Lee Chang-Dong on Rotterdam non-competition selection Poetry, though Musan is – an irresistibly appealing puppy aside – a much tougher, edgier, more demanding affair.

Juries often like to send out “signals” with their prize choices, and this may help the chances of Elisa Miller’s 67-minute Alicia, Go Yonder from Mexico, as Miller – already a Cannes Palme d’Or winner for short Watching It Rain – is, surprisingly and disappointingly, the sole female director in competition this year (last year two of the three Tiger winners were women). Alicia is a smudgy little rough-diamond of a picture, a more stylistically adventurous variant on the twee-romance sub-genre typified by Miranda July’s influential Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) – complete with end-credits “thanks” to Sylvia Plath.

The plight of Iranian directors Jafar Panahi and Mohamed Rasoulof, meanwhile, continues to make Iran a major talking-point in world cinema – and that could propel Majid Barzegar’s Rainy Seasons into serious Tiger contention. A solid if stylistically familiar character-study of a 20-year-old living on his own in a surprisingly western-feeling Tehran, it treads similar turf to Greek festival-opener Wasted Youth by Argyris Papadimitropoulos and Jan Vogel, the latter – following, in a tricksily bifurcated screenplay structure, a teenage skater and a middle-aged cop around the pre-riot streets of Athens – enjoying extra attention thanks to the Oscar nomination for Greece’s critical favourite Dogtooth announced on the very eve of the festival.

If nothing else, Wasted Youth deserves some prize for the most energetic guerrilla-marketing campaign of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, its distinctive white-on-black stickers being quickly ubiquitous in and around the festival’s venues.

In terms of deserving the actual Tigers, however, for this writer there’s one competitor which stands head and shoulders above its rivals, but which has proven so wildly divisive among those who’ve seen it – especially critics – that it has to be a dark-horse outsider for the awards. Written and directed by Catalonia’s Sergio Caballero, whose background is in music and visual art rather than cinema (he co-runs Barcelona’s acclaimed SONAR Festival), Finisterrae is an unclassifiable blend of high art and low comedy, in which a pair of recently-deceased Russian-speaking “ghosts” – dressed in Casper-style shrouds throughout – make a pilgrimage through windblown, marshy expanses of coastal Spain.

Stunningly beautiful, thanks to painterly DV imagery by cinematographer Eduard Grau – who also shot Albert Serra’s Honor de Cavalleria, one of the numerous movies cheekily “quoted”/spoofed by Caballero here – Finisterrae yielded howls of bemused derision at its press screening, but proved rather more palatable at public showings where many fell under its berserk, distinctive spell. First shown last Autumn at the Sitges festival for fantasy-themed cinema in Catalonia, Finisterrae has all the hallmarks of a near-instant cult classic and is surely the only picture in competition – perhaps the only new movie in the entire festival – which could conceivably claim masterpiece status.

Other Tiger candidates were skilfully made – Sivaroj Kongsakul’s delicate Thai romance Eternity, for example, or Carlos Moreno’s droll political satire All Your Dead Ones from Colombia – but decidedly familiar in their mood and approach (most conventional entry: so-so Russian black comedy Gromozeka from Vladimir Kott, a surprise crowdpleaser which topped Tiger entries in the audience-award voting.)

Then there were the more “experimental” efforts, most of which fell flat on their faces – Uchida Noboteru’s grating, improv-style relationship four-hander Love Addiction, Lawrence Tooley’s woefully uneven Headshots (from Germany), Sanjeewa Pushpakurama’s bafflingly obfuscatory Flying Fish (from Sri Lanka), and, worst of all, Vipin Vijay’s near-unwatchable farrago The Image Threads (from India). Sergio Borges’ The Sky Above, from Brazil, was the sole competitor to blend fiction and documentary elements – making one wonder why “straight” documentaries are excluded from the Tigers, a policy one doesn’t find at equivalent events such as Viennale or Locarno.

But while by no means perfect, Finisterrae is the only IFFR Tiger candidate to be both skilful and genuinely risk-taking, and even if – as seems likely at this stage – Caballero’s picture exits Rotterdam empty-handed, it will hopefully benefit from its exposure here to delight and confound audiences at festivals for the rest of the year and beyond.

Neil Young
Rotterdam, 4th February 2011

SHOULD WIN : Finisterrae, Bleak Night, Eternity
WILL WIN : Bleak Night, The Journals of Musan, Alicia Go Yonder

POST SCRIPT…
DID WIN — THE JOURNALS OF MUSAN, FINISTERRAE (!), ETERNITY