Tag: Rotterdam

Our verdict of the 53rd International Film Festival Rotterdam

Posted on by victorfraga

The 53rd edition of the largest film festival of the Netherlands drew to a close last night, after an intense film marathon of 11 days. In total, more than 400 films were showcased. Last year, the event boasted more than 280,000 visits, and there is little doubt that this audience figure could be exceeded this year (the exact numbers are still being finalised). There were three major competitive strands: the Tiger Competition, the Big Screen Competition and the Tiger Short Competitions, plus countless awards. Other programmes include RTM, Harbour, Limelight, Bright Future, Cinema Regained, and Short & Mid-length. The Art Directions programme is divided into Installation, Immersive Media, and sound//vision, while the Focus programmes feature Rachel Maclean, Scud, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Chile in the Heart, and Manetti Bros.

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Spoilt for choice

I attended the event for five days, and was impressed by the Festival’s ability to attract crowds to the cinema regardless of the film nationality, and the day and the time of the screening. Packed houses are always a heartwarming achievement, particularly on a Monday morning, and for a film made by a little-known director from the other side of the globe. Rotterdam succeeds at attracting film professionals and movie-lovers from across their small nation, Europe and the globe.

As a novice, I did not focus on a specific programme. Instead, I opted to taste a little bit of everything that was up for grabs. In total, we published 30 reviews throughout the duration of the event (including 11 republications from films that we had viewed in other festivals). The film selection is a delicious mixture of award-winning gems (such as Victor Erice’s moody and profound Close Your Eyes, Alice Rohrwacher’s quirky and idiosyncratic Chimera, Bertrand Bonello’s intellectually rigorous The Beast, Jonathan Glazer’s devastating The Zone of Interest, or Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami’s mesmerising ode to individual and artistic freedom Terrestrial Verses), and brand new, audacious films from every corner of the globe (my personal favourite was Alberto Grazia’s beautifully dissonant and strangely elegant The Rim/La Parra, but a very special mention also goes to Marcelo Gomes’s Portrait of a Certain Orient, Razka Robby Ertanto’s religious Indonesian drama Yohanna, and Fil Ieropoulos’s below-pictured “decolosining” doc Avant-Drag).

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The awards

The biggest festivals winners (from the two biggest competitive strands) are listed below:

  1. Rei (Japan) by Tanaka Toshihiko wins the Tiger Award 2024;
  2. Kiss Wagon (India) by Midhun Murali wins a Special Jury Award;
  3. Flathead (Australia) by Jaydon Martin wins a Special Jury Award; and
  4. The Old Bachelor (Iran) by Oktay Baraheni wins the VPRO Big Screen Award 2024.

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You can view our full coverage in. our review archive. The first two images on this article were snapped by Victor Fraga himself.

Assault

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP : LIVE FROM ROTTERDAM

There’s a crucial moment in Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Lord Jim where the protagonist has a moment of crisis. Does he live up to his romantic notions of heroism and die? Or is he a coward and survive? Conrad’s main point isn’t the intricacy of the reasoning or the philosophical arguments for the choice. Rather, it’s the fact that Lord Jim doesn’t really make the choice at all. One moment he’s thinking about it and the next it’s done.

In Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s new film there’s a similar moment of moral dilemma when math teacher Tazshy (Azamat Nigmanov) finds himself in the middle of a terrorist attack. Masked raiders have entered his school and started firing guns. He was in the lavatory sneaking a ciggy, upset with his ex-wife Lena (Aleksandra Revenko) who had shown up to take their son (who is in his class). Tazshy has locked the kids in the classroom and now the terrorists approach. Does he run to free them? Or save his skin? Like Lord Jim, he doesn’t really decide: he just finds himself sleep walking out of the school. When he’s asked about the class he assures everyone they got away before hopping on the rescue buses himself. It is a moment of weakness, terrible weakness. And Tazshy will spend the rest of the film trying to redeem himself.

No help is coming. The small village Karatas in Kazakhstan is locked in the midst of a frozen waste so white it reminded me of the white prison that lodges Robert Duvall in THX 1138 (1971). It screams ‘existential alienation’ at the top of its frosty lungs. The SWAT team won’t be there for days. A motley assortment made up of parents, the school principal (Teoman Khos), the police chief (Nurlan Smayilov) and the PE teacher Sopa (Berik Aitzhanov) will have to rescue the kids themselves. ‘Pragmatics,’ Tazshy tells them as the hours click down to the assault of the title. They’re partly aided by Afghanistan veteran Dalbych (Yerken Gubashev), who is now an alcoholic school janitor.

At every point it’s hard not to wonder what the Hollywood remake might look like. Certainly it follows the kind of action movie grammar, with arcs of redemption and what have you, but it does so just to kick them to one side at the moment you thought you were coming to a safe landing. Dalbych doesn’t transform Steven Segal like into a killing machine. Tazshy isn’t a Liam Neeson Dad-bot of violent revenge. The best shot of the bunch is actually Lena who proves to be a crack shot but even she lacks confidence to actually you know kill someone. One of the more physically capable of the crew is Turbo (Daniyar Alshinov), a young man with special needs who can run like lightning (though stopping him proves difficult).

The obvious real life parallel to draw would be with the Beslan attack in 2004 and there is a strong satirical edge, particularly in the denouement. Yet the terrorists are as blank as the landscape, never revealing themselves as anything other than McGuffins. What saves the film from tastelessness is that constant subversion of expectation. When one character confesses something intimate, another one mockingly tells his neighbour: ‘your turn, don’t you want to tell us about when your uncle touched you?’ None of these characters will grow from this, or learn anything. One feels that the whole thing could easily just get drifted over and disappear from human sight. There’s a bitter dark humour similar to Riders of Justice (2021), if not quite as adroit. And it’s tastelessness is more honest and straightforward than the ghoulish right wing fantasy Run Hide Fight (2020), which had a similar concept.

The International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR) is an online edition running from 26 January to 6 February.

The Plains

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP : LIVE FROM ROTTERDAM

This is a really boring film. For the most part, it consists of a single camera set up in the back of a car which records a series of commutes from Andrew’s place of work to the suburbs of Melbourne. The first ten minutes he’s just driving on his own, phoning his wife and his mum who is in a care home and listening to the radio. A younger colleague David joins him on a few of the journeys and they talk. Awkwardly at first. They both work for a legal firm and neither of them are particularly happy about it. Especially a superior called Marie who comes in for some stick. Andrew has a bit of a ‘know it all’ air to him, his voice not that different from the talk radio. Some of the conversation is so banal you might want to try and bite your own ears off. How common are red cars? It’s like Peter Kay’s Car Share but without the jokes, or Peter Kay. So it’s just basically a car share.

And yet… and yet. There is something genuinely fascinating about this film too. You gradually get to know all about Andrew and David. Andrew has a long marriage to Cheri and his mother is dying from dementia in a nursing home in Adelaide. David has just broken up with his girlfriend and is living with friends. He might apply to the bar and set up his own practice. Andrew has a whole thing with his sisters. And again his mother seems to be deteriorating. The infrequent cuts always come as something of a shock. How comfortable we seem to have become as backseat passengers, listening in. Then suddenly Andrew’s on his own again with only the company of the radio. When he’s alone his conversation with his wife are a little longer and a little more tender. He’s brusque when David’s in the car and jokes about Cheri in a plaintive way. Some of the cuts take us out of the car altogether albeit briefly. Once released from the confines of the backseat we soar into the sky on one of Andrew’s drones which he delights in using to take shots of the countryside. Very late in the film he’ll show some of these films to David and there’s the strangely dizzy feeling of the film setting up a state of infinite regress.

We also get to know Andrew’s commute. The two speed bumps before he gets to the first intersection. The tricky run on to the motorway. The part where there always seems to be a traffic jam. The weather changes and with it the city and you get a feel for the rhythms of life, the hum of a humdrum routine. The near three hour running time makes me wonder: would anybody’s conversation become interesting once you learn to listen and watch intently? David Easteal, the director and I’m assuming Andrew’s passenger, leaves Andrew in the driving seat. We don’t really get to see much of either of them: just the backs of necks and what the rear view mirror occasionally reveals. At one point a drone’s point of view zooms down to Andrew’s house where he’s sitting controlling it on the porch. It looms into Cherie’s face with a jokey/aggressive insistence. Ironically it makes Cherie into the most seen face of the whole film.

At the risk of being repetitive, this is a boring film. And yet boring and interesting are not necessarily mutually exclusive – ask Steve Davis. Towards the end David scratches at Andrew’s story of decades long monogamy and finds there might have been another love long ago. But when David asks him to tell that story, Andrew for once clams up: ‘Let’s just enjoy the drive, David.’ The weird thing is I kind of did.

The International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR) is an online edition running from 26 January to 6 February.

Please Baby Please

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP : LIVE FROM ROTTERDAM

I think I counted three major film references in the first three minutes of Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please which opened Rotterdam International Film Festival. There’s a West Side Story gang dances-advances on a couple on a studio bound New York street. They Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1970) a couple to death before the horrified eyes of Arthur and Suze (Harry Melling and Andrea Riseborough), who like Janet and Brad from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975), find themselves and their relationship transformed as they open themselves up to the possibilities of transgression. Arthur is particularly struck by Teddy (Karl Glusman), one of the Young Gents – as the gang is called – who dresses like Marlon Brando in The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953). Maybe four references.

Obviously camp is about exactly this. Taking on popular culture, reviving, restyling, parodying, pastiching, subverting and celebrating. It hovers constantly between a smirk and an embrace, over the top jumping for joy and bursting into floods of tears, but always with a slight ironic detachment. Phew. Arthur and Suze are in the process already of transformation. They live in apartment 2B, daring someone to add a Hamlet quote to the address. They hold intellectual discussions about gender identity with their poetry beatnik friends. They weigh up the benefits patriarchy bestows on a man against the horseshit indoctrination you have to go through as a boy. Upstairs lives Maureen, played by a lavishly served Demi Moore: “I ought to be famous, but I’m just married,” as she succinctly puts it. Gifted with household appliances she uses as sex aids, she fantasizes about being choked by her ‘daddy’ and gives Suze another possible identity to slip into.

This is a New York of dive bars and alleyways, streets wet with neon: more Herbert Selby Jr than Don Draper. The music has that grungy riff on 50s style that Angelo Badalamenti gave David Lynch’s weirder neighbourhoods. It’s a place lit by late Rainer Werner Fassbinder and early John Waters. And yet for all that there’s something almost too tasteful and restrained about Kramer’s approach. It’s erotic but not sexy. There’s no grit in the vaseline; no pain to the violence. And going back to Don Draper, there actually is a smoothness to this whole exercise, the distinct whiff of footnotes. You’re waiting for a moment to let rip but it doesn’t really come. Despite its musical feel, there are no real numbers – by far the highlight comes with a sad croon from Cole Escola dressed in drag in a phone booth. Towards the end Melling has a bit of a dance but it doesn’t exactly burst from the screen. Riseborough once again proves a daring and constantly fascinating performer. She’s also credited as an executive producer on the project. She is all energy and danger, gradually turning into a howling prowling gender fluid force of nature – a brundlefly combination of Teddy and Maureen.

Paradoxically for all its palimpsest of allusions Please Baby Please is like nothing being made at the moment and on that alone richly deserves an audience. It looks beautiful, with the production design and costumes specifically deserving mention. One wonders though: will it be the kind of film that a few decades down the line another film like this would be alluding to?

The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) is an online edition running from 26 January to 6 February.

Ray & Liz

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

What about this, a piece of British kitchen sink that continues the spirit of Bill Douglas and Terence Davies, without leaning on the crutch of miserablism or heavy-handed political metaphor. Ray & Liz does go to some difficult, dark places, but with a sense of humour, a generous spirit, and a dedication to recapturing the memories of youth. This is photographer Richard Billingham’s reminiscence of childhood in the Black Country, in the West Midlands. Two notable, heartrending stories tied together by present day Ray, who sits around his bedroom drinking himself to death while a neighbour provides him with homebrews. He thinks back to his ’80s home life with his wife Liz, raising kids while sinking into poverty.

But the first story barely features Ray and Liz at all. It’s mostly a two-hander between the amazing British character actor Tony Way as Ray’s simple but sweet brother, charged with looking after the kids, and Sam Gittins as a nihilistic punk who has other ideas. It’s a dynamic straight out of the great Mike Leigh’s Meantime (1984), Gittins channelling one of Gary Oldman’s breakthrough performances.

As played by Ella Smith, Liz is a sensational character, a force of nature who dominates every scene she’s in and whose presence hangs over the film when she’s offscreen. With a flick of the wrist or a well-timed wince, everything that’s going on inside her head comes across, Billingham’s tight photography capturing the air sucking out of a room. Often when a photographer turns to movies, the results can feel somewhat airless, but the style of Billingham’s work is part sitcom, part art-house, all coming together into a complete vision.

The result is the feeling of being told stories second-hand. It’s when you’re visiting an old family member and they tell you about what their cousin used to up to. It’s when you dig through the loft and find a shoebox full of old toys. Because when someone tells you about their past, the rarely contextualise it in a political era. They are far more likely to tell you about specific faces, places, and things. And that’s what Gillingham does. Bad art adorns the walls of this flat. Liz clearly loves pictures of animals, they’re all over her mugs, they’re the jigsaw puzzles she struggles with. This art provides a counterpoint to the events on screen, with effective cuts from a nosebleed to a painting of a caveman poking his own nose. It’s as though the room is speaking to the characters.

By packing so much detail into these memories, Ray & Liz manages to avoid the cliches of the genre. There are no clips of Thatcher on television or mention of the mines closing to set the scene. We don’t need it. Garish ’70s carpets, a cooker black with dust, even a squashed kitchen roll instead tell the viewer the entire socio-economic situation of the characters. In the final third of the film, the characters do come into more direct contact with the system, but it’s not trying to raise eyebrows or stir tweets in the way that recent Ken Loach tends to. It’s Billingham’s story, and the realities of that aren’t turned into melodrama or sermon. And it feels all the more like a remarkable depiction of Britain for it.

Ray & Liz showed at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, when this piece was originally written. On UK cinemas on March 8th. On VoD on Monday, July 8th.