Films from the South's Brynjar Bjerkem reports from the Rotterdam Film Festival
Rotterdam (IFFR) – the first large festival of the year, has just finnished its contribution to the 2011 film year. This edition of the festival was the 40th and celebrated in different ways. One programme section this year was only dedicated to directors whom in previous years have won the festival main prize, the tiger. Over a series of years Rotterdam has established itself as a forerunner by opening up to experimental film, to new ways of preceiving cinema and to cooperate with the city’s many exhibition sites both for visual arts. The 40 year jubilee was visualised through a programme involving 40 partners around the city, descriptively named IFFR XL. Of practical reasons free bike rental came with the ticket. The exhibition site closest to the zeitgeist of the day was the V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, running a series of 3D enhanced shorts that trasferred from iPhones and iPads by mirrors onto projection screens imaginitively appeared as small hand held viewing boxes.
This signature holder has a long and regular relationship to Rotterdam and has seen the festival grow to become a ”beast” of an audience festival – 340.000 tickets sold this year only – perfectly able on a 9.30am weekend screening to sell out venues of 6-700 people, even for non-narrative films from India and China. No wonder directors and staff of less profiled films gladly may pay their own air fare to be able to stand in front of the screen and observe such generous interest.
The festival’s programme of competition is dedicated to boost young film makers, equal to our own section of New Directions. It may be argued that this section situated within a generally generous programme not always has proved the most exciting part of the festival, - and quickly add that we here have seen some interesting change appear over the last few years. First of all the competition programme increasingly has become very relevant seen from our own festival’s point of view, internationally premiering a number of films from Asia and Latin America. The artistic level of the programme also appears as considerably improved. This may have to do with the fact that the group of film makers the programme wishes to bring to attention generally are working on limited budgets. The change preceived may have to do with a combination of access to new and low-cost digital production technology and a stronger role to film-political production funds like the Hubert Bals Fund, an important partner of collaboration for the Rotterdam festival. This year’s programme of competition certainly offered on a number of excellent films.
Every year three ”tigers” are generously given out. This year these went to Sergio Caballero’s Finisterrae (Spain), Sivaroj Kongsakul’s Eternity (Thailand) and Park Jung Bum’s The journals of Musan (S.Korea). The jury consisted of profiles like Lucrecia Martel (The headless woman), Wisit Sasanatieng (Tears of the Black Tiger) and Lee Ranaldo (of Sonic Youth). Caballero’s film is a comic approach to existential modernism, on two Russian spoken ghosts on the way to Santiago de Campostela to find the path to re-birth. I expect the film will not be screened at Films From the South (wrong country) - but I recommend the film, should an opportunity to see it prove itself. On Eternity the festival writes ”the sort of love story that can only be believed in Thailand”. This is a new and mesmerizing contribution to Thai slow cinema (comparable to last year’s Cannes winner on Uncle Boonmee) on belonging to family and space and on the ties that will always be there between the living and the deceased. The journals of Musan is a contribution to South Korean big city tristesse, about a North Korean illegal refugee trying to make ends meet and money to send home. This spectator found greater pleasure (or was it uncomfort?) by South Korean Yoon Sung-Hyun’s exam film Bleak night about a father approaching the ex-friends of his deceased son following a (probable) suicide to get an answer to what went wrong. The film offers a dark tangle of intense relationship between three friends in a Korean ”high school” and on how the lack of balance between equal friendship and dominance may go wrong. In the competition programme also was All your dead ones by Colombian Carlos Moreno about a farmer that one morning finds a pile of fifty human bodies on his field, so taking on a highly infectious theme in today’s Colombia: The ongoing and systematic liquidation of civilians done by para-military groups. Worth mention is also the short situation based feature Alicía, go yonder by Elisea Miller (Mexico) shot in moments of mood on super-8 and DV about a young girl who leaves home for the first time to live with friends in a small town in southern Argentina.
These are just a few a long list of good films we hope to present in our own festival later this year. The highlight of the festival on my part I found in the previously mentioned Return of the Tiger – programme, in Malaysian Tan Chui Mui’s wonderful and dreamlike Year without a summer, also made with the help of the Hubert Bals Fund. It’s then appropriate to round things off by saying that the Films From the South are looking very much forward to see our own Sørfond come into operation and be part of giving idealist film makers an opportunity to make good films.
Brynjar Bjerkem / in Rotterdam for Films From the South
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