DAILY TIGER
NEDERLANDSE EDITIE Z.O.Z
39TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM #3 SATURDAY 30 JANUARY 2010
Intimate strangers: Noah Taylor and Amanda Fuller, the lead actors in Simon Rumley’s tense thriller Red, White & Blue, came through a maelstrom of shooting – included getting lost in a snake-infested National Park – and lived to tell the Daily Tiger all about it. (See interview on page 9)
photo: Nadine Maas
Hothouse powers The Rotterdam Film Lab is a networking opportunity for young producers on a massive scale – and much more besides. Geoffrey Macnab looks forward to the tenth anniversary event
67 young producers are due to arrive in Rotterdam this weekend with scripts in their back pockets to take part in the tenth anniversary edition of the Rotterdam Lab. They’ll spend five days learning how to survive and prosper in the hothouse atmosphere of a film market. How do you approach a sales agent? How do you piece together an international co-production? How do you pitch? What is the secret of getting your film into a festival? What are the perils in the post-production process? These are some of the questions that will be addressed during the intensive five-day Lab. There will be panel sessions, speed dating sessions, coaching sessions, lunches, cocktails and even a special 10th-anniversary dinner on Saturday night. In 2001, when the Lab was launched, there were less than 20 participants, chosen by four international partner organisations. A decade on, the Rotterdam Lab is as intrinsic a part of Rotter-
dam as the Hubert Bals Fund or the VPRO Tiger Awards competition. Rotterdam Lab co-ordinator Jacobine van der Vloed points out that the Lab was founded because of the festival’s need to give producers the opportunity to acquire expertise and knowledge: it is difficult for emerging producers to meet people at larger festivals. Epic opportunity
Up-and-coming producers from all over the world will be in town this week for what is – at the very least – a networking opportunity on an epic scale. “The main idea behind this is to build up relationships not only for the festival but also for the delegates. It is to create an environment for people who haven’t been to a bigger festival and to make it easier for them,” Van der Vloed suggests. Many young producers who’ve attended Rotterdam for the first time to take part in the Lab have subsequently returned, either with CineMart projects or with films in the main festival programme. Participating in the Rotterdam Lab means learning about different approaches to communicating with other film professionals. “There’s not one way,” says Van der Vloed, “There’s your own way - and we try to make this as effective as possible”.
Evolution
A Lab ‘graduate’ last year was Australian producer Paul Sullivan of Benchmark Films, who is back in Rotterdam to present CineMart project A Life Half Lived by Denie Pentecost. Meanwhile, delegates also strike up alliances with one another. Last year, Antoine Simkine of Les Films D’Antoine in France met Jean-Yves Roubin of FraKas Productions in Belgium. Now, they are working together on Hors Les Murs, directed by David Lambert. “That is how it evolves,” Van der Vloed reflects. The Lab is truly international, with 21 international partners: film agencies ranging from the Singapore Film Commission to Scottish Screen. The idea is that these agencies will fund the attendance of delegates from their territory. This year, reflecting IFFR’s emphasis on Africa, the festival’s Hubert Bals Fund has supported the participation in the Lab of three African filmmakers: Emily Wanja (Kenya), Alberto Manuel Sona Botelho (Angola) and Paul Lwanga Jr (Zambia). The mood among participants is collegiate. They generally create their own social networking page, and there will be Rotterdam Lab reunions at other festivals. Seasoned industry professionals with packed Rotterdam diaries have invariably been willing to make time for Lab sessions. After
all, they are as keen as the festival itself to identify new talent. “They see it as a benefit,” Van der Vloed says. “It’s their future as well. These sales agents and producers need to have new projects in the future.” Intimate
Representatives from sales outfits such as Fortissimo, Strand Releasing, the Coproduction Office and TrustNordisk will be passing on advice on sales and distribution. Financiers and even critics will be sharing their expertise. Eurimages Executive Director Roberto Olla will be making a presentation. The delegates will learn practical tips from in-depth case studies of “post-production management” on the film Altiplano. They will also get to grips with the complexities of Latin-American/European coproduction through a case study of Tiger competitor Agua fría de mar. With close to 70 delegates from over 20 countries, the Lab is near to full capacity. “I’d say it is about the maximum,” Van der Vloed suggests. “67 is not intimate, but it is still possible to get to meet everybody. That’s what CineMart is about. It’s 800 people, but we try to create an informal and intimate atmosphere. And this is what we want to create with the Rotterdam Lab as well.”
More than Zero
Inside story Tobias Lindholm tells Edward Lawrenson how he and co-director Michael Noer got inside the Danish prison system to make Tiger competitor R
Polish director Pawel Borowski tells Ola Salwa why he likes playing games with his audience
Zero is all about numbers: 24 hours, 24 characters, one metropolis. The Polish city in which Pawel Borowski’s film is set is anonymous, so too are its citizens. Even every car’s plate starts with “DOE”, as in Jane/John Doe. Meticulously scripted, the narrative advances with fine, orderly precision. We meet each character (including a CEO, a porn star, a cabbie, a lonely wife and a bartender) and observe what happens to him/her, and then the director ‘switches’ focus to the next person. The cinematography is by Arkadiusz Tomiak: tight close-ups and toned-down colors give the impression of distance and detachment. Even though the characters face violence or personal dramas, they remain indifferent, as if nothing happened to them. “Has anything happened at all?” is, according to Borowski, the most important question in Zero. Asked about the choice of interlocking narrative, he says: “It’s like meeting somebody on the street. I wanted to ask a question: ‘How well can we get to know a person using only scraps of information?’ Today, because it’s easier and shorter, we prefer to talk over mobiles or contact each other via Facebook to meeting face-to-face. But this way, we discover only pieces, just like the viewers of Zero. The rest is out of the frame.” The interlocking narrative instantly evokes Robert Altman, Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu and Paul Thomas Anderson, but this is a false lead. “I don’t really tell 24 different stories, I tell just one. Characters and events add up to a whole,” the director – who also wrote the script and coproduced Zero, his directorial debut – comments. The film was released in Poland in October 2009 but attracted only an average-size audience and lukewarm reviews. The reception was warmer abroad at the international film festivals in Pusan and Sao Paolo. Before Zero, Borowski directed animated shorts Love Gamestation and I Love You (selected for the 54th Berlinale and the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival). He graduated in painting and animation from Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1997 and has had a solo exhibition in prestigious museums in Warsaw. “When I added up all the ideas I found interesting, I realised that film would be the most accurate form for expressing them.” With a short story that would later become the script for Zero, he turned to producer Piotr Dzieciol from Opus Film, who has a reputation for working with young and daring filmmakers. “I respect his opinions and I knew that whatever he told me would be honest and candid”, he says. Luckily, Dzieciol expressed interest in the project, so pre-production and budget completion could start. “For me, the cinema is not just motion pictures with sound; it is the game played between these pictures and its audience. And I treat my viewers seriously, because this game happens in their minds,” Borowski concludes. Currently, he’s working on a script for his next feature. “All I can say is that it will be fewer characters and more game with the audience than in Zero.”
One of the happy accidents behind the making of R, a gripping, gritty contemporary prison drama from Danish directors Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer, occurred in a bar in Copenhagen. It was here that Lindholm met Roland Møller. Inspired by writing letters to a childhood friend who was in jail for drugs offences, Lindholm decided to start a prison movie while still at film school. “I knew in my stomach it was something I hadn’t seen in Danish cinema up till then,” he explains. Then Møller, a friend of a friend, found out about the project and approached him. Møller had served time and, Lindholm explains, “he wanted to tell me some stories about his experience in prison. So I asked him if he could help me write a script and that’s how it started.” A further stroke of luck provided another impetus to development. “I found out that the oldest prison in Denmark, Horsens state prison, was closing down and, to my surprise, this was where Roland had served time.” Lindholm called his producer at the time to look into getting access to Horsens: a company had planned to turn the building into an amusement park, but the venture failed after the withdrawal of some Icelandic backers, which gave the green light to the film. “At that time, we didn’t have the plot of the story: I just knew I could make a very realistic portrait of prison life if I could get inside the prison, and inside my friend Roland’s head.” Lindholm’s next step was to contact Michael Noer as a co-director. Noer’s background is in documentary: experience he could bring to the project to match Lindholm’s fictional craftsmanship. Authenticity
was key to the project. “The most important thing when we started doing the script was to make it as honest as possible,” Lindholm says. “When we got to the prison, we decided to research among the guards and prisoners who’d been in that prison so that every story we’d tell would somehow be connected to that prison.” Following Rune (Pilou Asbæk), a young man locked up for an unspecified crime, the movie revolves around his fluctuating fortunes within the prison hierarchy, and his attempt to curry favour with the ‘boss’ of his cell block by smuggling drugs between his floor and that occupied by the Arabic-speaking prisoners below. “The way he moves these drugs is exactly what happened for real,” says Lindholm. This insistence on authenticity extends to the cast. Asbæk is the only professional actor – his contact among the Muslim prisoners is played by Omar Shargawi, who directed 2008 Tiger entry Go With
Peace Jamal. Most of the rest of the cast had some prior connection to Horsens prison. Møller, for instance, was brought on board as a consultant and played the Mason, a career criminal who bullies Rune when the young man first arrives in jail. And Kim Winther, who plays the guard Kim, was himself a guard at the old Horsens prison. So given this level of research, what did the prison authorities think of the film? “They haven’t seen it yet,” says Lindholm, “but I’m looking forward to it. Of course there are a lot of things in the film that could get our sources and informants in trouble, but the good part about making fiction is you can always just blame the writer!” VPRO Tiger Awards Competition R – Tobias Lindholm & Michael Noer Sat 30 19:00 PA4, Sun 31 22:00 LUX, Tue 02 13:30 PA3, Sat 06 22:45 PA6
Summer in the city Debut director Martijn Maria Smits’s Tiger competitor C’est déjà l’été wasn’t just inspired by the Dardennes brothers, he tells Geoffrey Macnab
It’s almost inevitable that critics are already trying to pin the “Dardenne” label on young Dutch filmmaker Martijn Maria Smits. After all, his debut feature was shot in Seraing, Belgium: the setting for many Dardenne brothers films. The irony is that Smits wasn’t lured to Seraing by the Dardennes. What took him there initially was a desire to work in an industrial heartland. “Seraing was the best option. It was close to Holland. I don’t have a driver’s licence and I don’t have much money, so it was logical that I went there.” Smits quickly fell in love with Seraing. The people there were still openly nostalgic for their industrial past. “They have a warm heart for the
work they used to do.” Yes, Smits admits, he was an admirer of the Dardenne brothers. However, he didn’t realize at first that they had shot their movies in precisely the locations he was planning to use. “The Dardennes always shoot in close so you don’t see much of the environment. I was
walking and I thought some places look familiar!” The main protagonist of C’est déjà l’été is Eric, a wild teenager who bunks off school and messes around with guns. After many casting sessions with kids who were “too nice” and wanted to be in a Harry Potter movie, he found local kid Benjamin Willem. Benjamin was tough and truculent. What’s more, he had a cinematic face. “In the beginning, it was very rough when we were rehearsing. He was walking like was a gangster. He wanted to be in a gangster movie,” the director recalls. Smits didn’t tell him much about the project other than that he was going to be driving a moped round town and that he was going to be playing a young guy who steals. Smits studied documentary. Now, as he puts it, he has “fallen into fiction,” but his films still have a strong verité feel. Having made C’est déjà l’été in Seraing, he has now decamped to Buenos Aires where he is plotting a film about slum dwellers making a living by sifting through the garbage, looking for material they can sell. “That’s the thing I really like,” the director says of his foray to South America. “I go to Seraing. I don’t speak the language and I don’t know anybody… in Buenos Aires, it’s the same.” In other words, Smits relishes plunging into new worlds. He is as keen an admirer of Walter Salles and Carlos Reygadas as he is of the Dardennes. The director is clearly delighted to be competing in Rotterdam. “I always go every year… we always secretly go upstairs, steal posters and try to get in touch with filmmakers. In that way, I am a real nerd. It’s so weird – IFFR is for Tsai Ming-liang, Harmony Korine and all the big names. Now I am selected, I still can’t believe it!” VPRO Tiger Awards Competition C’est déjà l’été – Martijn Maria Smits Sat 16:15 30 PA4, Sun 31 16:15 PA5, Mon 01 10:15 PA4, Sat 06 21:45 PA5
Zero – Pawel Borowski
Sat 30 22:00 DJZ, Sun 31 09:30 CI6, Wed 03 20:00 DJZ
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Fund Fare New head of the Netherlands Film Fund, Doreen Boonekamp, intends to freshen up the organisation and connect better with local audiences, she tells Nick Cunningham
Doreen Boonekamp, who took over as head of the Netherlands Film Fund in October 2009, yesterday outlined her short and long-term priorities for the institution. “First, we need the organisation freshened up,” she stressed. “And we need to simplify the regulations to reduce bureaucracy to a minimum. When I’ve done that, around summer 2010, we will reconsider budget allocations and set priorities to bring them in line with our main goals of professionalisation, talent development and international co-operation.”
of which over €11.7 million is earmarked for the production and development of arthouse and mainstream films. The Supplementary Fund, valued at €11.75 million, provides top-up finance for commercial projects, while a commercial and an artistic consultant are charged with seeking out projects they can help finance. Both consultants have a production and development budget valued at €3 million over two years. Documentaries benefit from Fund coffers to the tune of €2.78 million per year, while €1.5 million is invested in international productions in which a Dutch producer has a minority interest. Distribution, exhibition and other miscellaneous requirements, as well as a significant annual financial commitment to Eurimages just shy of €1 million, combine to increase Fund investment by a further €5.5 million per year.
Budget
Better connection
The Fund oversees an annual budget for funding of activities of over €35 million (fixed 2009-2013),
While Dutch films have been performing with increasing credit over the past few years at the local box office, Boonekamp bemoans the general ambivalence on the part of local punters to turn out for the country’s arthouse fare. 2009 may have been a wonderful year for Dutch arthouse selections at some of the world’s key festivals, but the vast majority of the box-office market share claimed by Dutch films (17.38%) was for mainstream titles.
Golden age times Ioana Uricaru, one of the directors of the Romanian portmanteau film Tales from the Golden Age, looks forward to arriving at IFFR as one of this year’s Cinéfondation filmmakers
Ten years ago, the Cinéfondation section of the Cannes film festival started what they sometimes call “the Villa Medicis of international cinema”: a residency programme in Paris for emerging filmmakers from all over the world. The process: apply, get selected from among the twelve finalists, impress the jury headed by Gilles Jacob on your in-person interview. Simple and easy. Not. The prize is big: four and a half months living in Paris at the expense of the Festival, surrounded by five like-minded, scarily-talented people, with free access to cinemas, optional French lessons and European film industry contacts just a phone-call away... all you have to do is write. A feature. Which will hopefully get made – ninety percent of the projects developed in the residency have been. It’s almost a cliche to say that you’re going to Paris for a few months to write – but I found this is very much a test of one’s willpower. I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t perversely set up to weed out those who fail the self-discipline test. Every morning when you wake up, there’s the choice between sitting at the desk to work or exploring the city... when it’s not one of those days when you have a scheduled private visit to the Musee d’Orsay or the Chateau de Versailles... In this embarrassment of riches, knowing that the Rotterdam festival is approaching has a sobering effect. As part of the programme, we will pitch the projects we’ve been working on to producers at CineMart – which means we have to be in pretty good shape, script-wise. One thing we’ll have for sure is a glossy, professionally-made brochure with which to present each project. A brochure sponsored by the festival and therefore bearing its palm-frond logo: a good luck omen if there ever was one! Three of us also have films being presented at the festival – Paz Fábrega (Agua Fría de Mar, Costa Rica) in competition, Oliver Hermanus (Shirley Adams, South Africa) and myself (Tales From the Golden Age, Romania) in non-competitive sections. When we return to our Paris home after Rotterdam, we’ll start packing (the 19th session of the Residence ends on February 15), but thankfully we’ll be able to stop by any time we are in Paris – the apartment has a guest room for past residents. As a former resident told me when I was still at the stage of biting my nails wondering if I was going to make the 12-finalists selection: this is a lifetime membership. Seems surreal. It makes you want to write and then make a really, really good movie... Tales from the Golden Age
Wed 03 19:00 PA3, Fri 05 14:45 LA2, Sat 06 13:15 PA7
“Our arthouse films have to connect much better with the domestic market,” Boonekamp pointed out. “I don’t believe that we should continue solely with the conventional ways of marketing. In the case of arthouse, we must look into cross-media and digital marketing. These films travel from theatre to theatre and are not like the big films that open simultaneously across all cinemas. We need to extend the publicity for a much longer time to let the public know that the film is still out there. What’s more, the films should connect much more thematically with what people want to see in this country.” Upping the ante
Boonekamp underlined not only her intention to up the ante in terms of talent investment – “it’s always part of the game that you need talent and we can support that need” – but, as importantly for IFFR readers, she repeated the mantra of internationalism that she intoned when head of the Netherlands Film Festival. “I am determined to integrate with more and more international industries,” she explained. “We are a modest-sized country with a modest language area, but if you want a high level of film production you must be determined to look beyond your borders, not only for financing matters but to exchange cinematic
Doreen Boonekamp
ideas. If you want your films to resonate abroad you need to work closely with international partners. For this reason, I’m looking at increasing our level of co-production money in the future – for 2010 the budget has already been slightly raised – and to intensify international co-operation with funds, as well as look into the possibilities of establishing treaties with other countries.
IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
Films about China’s vast army of immigrant workers usually focus on their social problems. Hsu Ronin’s The Annunciation takes a different tack, zeroing in on their personal lives, Hsu tells Richard James Havis
The director, who’s based in Beijing, says that he wanted to avoid describing too many social issues, so he could avoid stereotyping his subjects. “I respect these workers, but a lot of people look down on them. They think that people from the countryside only want to make money. They don’t think of them as real people with everyday needs. I wanted to show their humanity – that they need love like anyone else,” continues Hsu. “Making money is not the only thing they are concerned about. They care just as much about their personal lives as urban people. I wanted to give them some respect with this film. People may not think much of them, but they are the foundation of Chinese society. They
have contributed a lot to the country’s economic development.” The characters in The Annunciation are obsessed by having a baby. When the husband proves impotent, it leads the wife into to an affair with her employer: “Chinese people are very traditional when it comes to having a child. The child is important because it carries on the family line. So there is a lot of pressure to have one. In my film, the mother is insistent that the two reproduce. The husband becomes fanatical about it. But by the end, he has learned something: that there is more to life than reproducing. He learns that the love of his wife is just as important to him.” The movie grew out of research that Hsu carried out for a film that was never made. “I had researched the characters for another project, so I didn’t do too much research for the script. I had talked to a lot of workers from the countryside, and that gave me the idea for the story about having a baby. It was an original idea that wasn’t based on any one
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couple.” Hsu says he wrote the script for some actors he knew: “Yan Yan Zhao and Bao Xu Liu are my friends. I wrote it specially for them. We thrashed out the characters in rehearsal.” Hsu wrote, produced, photographed, directed and edited The Annunciation. A cinematographer friend was hired to shoot the film, but proved too traditional – he didn’t want to move the camera. “He couldn’t understand the way I wanted him to use the camera. He thought it was impossible to shoot it the way that I wanted. So I had to take over.” Hsu shouldered other tasks due to economic considerations: “I couldn’t afford an editor, so I did it myself.” Hsu studied at the Beijing Academy Of Drama. He says he respects the fact that the Sixth Generation directors covered similar ground in their films. “But I’m not part of any generation myself,” he says. “I make my own style of film.” The Annunciation – Hsu Ronin
Sat 30 19:15 PA5, Sun 31 9:30 CI5, Mon 01 14:15 GSC
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Old world charm
Apocalypse then Olaf Möller, programmer of IFFR’s After Victory section, looks beyond combat movies to investigate the (cinematic) legacy of war, he tells Ben Walters
French-based director Eugène Green’s next ode to European civilisation will focus on Fado music, he tells Geoffrey Macnab
Maverick French-based auteur Eugène Green is getting to grips with Fado, the Portuguese music genre characterized by its mournful quality and emphasis on nostalgia. Green’s new feature, Fado and Ghosts, will be part fiction and part documentary. It will explore the roots and history of Fado, while also including Green’s own reflections on historical Portuguese characters. This will be Green’s second Portuguese project, following on from his new feature The Portuguese Nun, which is screening in Rotterdam this week. Green professes himself an impassioned admirer of Portuguese culture and literature. “I have an elective affinity with Portuguese like I have with French,” he said. “When finally I discovered Lisbon, it corresponded to the image I had in my mind.” In The Portuguese Nun, Green plays a director in Lisbon making a film version of the 17th-century book, Letters From The Portuguese Nun. The film is about the experiences of a young French actress (Leonor Baldaque) who has come to Portugal to star in the film. While preparing for the role, she is deeply affected by her encounter with a real nun. Green shot the movie with an all-Portuguese crew (other than his regular cameraman Raphael O’Byrne) and with a primarily Portuguese cast. The film also makes plentiful use of Fado songs. Alongside the Fado feature-doc, Green is also preparing a new dramatic feature set in contemporary times but evoking the figure of the great Baroque architect, Francesco Borromini, who was born in Ticino in Switzerland in 1599 and worked mianly in Rome. La Sapience – as it will be called – will star Swiss actor Bruno Todeschini and Green’s regular collaborator Christelle Prot. Barbarian invasions
Here in Rotterdam, Green had some pointed remarks to make about the USA, a country he refuses to refer to by name (he calls it “Barbaria”). US-born himself, Green grew up in New York but doesn’t look back on his American childhood with any affection. He won’t speak English in most interviews and is withering in his contempt for the cultural influence of America on the world. “I accept to speak English in Great Britain. When I was in London [at the London Film Festival], I did Q&As in English, but it is also a political thing,” Green stated. “For me, the barbarisation of everything and the use of pseudo-English
Eugène Green
photo: Ruud Jonkers
is one of the things that is contributing to the end of European civilization. Most people here say they speak English. They don’t speak English. They speak a kind of pidgin dialect that you can do business in, but that you can’t express thoughts or feelings in.” Green arrived in Europe in 1968. He was 20 years old, and says he was immediately smitten by the old world values he encountered. “Europe existed for me in my youth through literature only – through music and painting,” Green stated. “For me, it was reality because it was civilization. It was countries which had real languages…anywhere in Europe, it was real life because the present contains the past and the future, whereas in Barbaria, the present contains nothing.” Mature adolescence
Green was in Paris in the late 60s, participating in student demonstrations. “But that wasn’t the most
important thing for me. It was what I discovered through culture and spirituality. That enabled me to develop. Everything I express comes from what a psychoanalyst would call an adolescent personality, but I needed maturity to be able to express my adolescent personality.” The filmmaker flagged up the increasing prominence of festivals like Rotterdam at a time when arthouse distribution in Europe is suffering. “Festivals are important, especially festivals like Rotterdam and Locarno, which are centred on art cinema. My films are distributed commercially in France and this one [The Portuguese Nun] will be distributed in Portugal also. But there are films here that will be distributed in no countries, so festivals are really very important.” The Portuguese Nun – Eugène Green Fri 29 13:30 PA6, Sat 30 22:30 CI4
COINING IT IN The money’s beginning to roll into IFFR’s Cinema Reloaded initiative, reports Nick Cunningham
Cinema Reloaded co-producer Anne van der Linden spoke to the Daily Tiger yesterday about her decision to invest generously in two of the projects offered up for investment by the IFFR public. The majority of her investment (a cool €250) went to Alexis Dos Santos for Another World: Rocky + Lulu, with another €50 cash injection for Ho Yuhang’s Untitled Project. “I saw Dos Santos’ Glue and Unmade Beds and I wanted to give him the chance to make a new film,” commented Van der Linden, an Amsterdam-based television drama director/producer. “But I found the Ho Yuhang project interesting too.” So in her capacity as a TV producer, would she be interested in working more closely with Dos Santos? “Maybe when we meet I will be interested in supporting him some more,” she responded. Once a Cinema Reloaded project hits the €30,000 target, it can go into production, although production coffers can be swelled to a jackpot of €60,000
per project. At close of play on Friday, Dos Santos’ film was leading the way, with investments totally €2,380. Pipilotti Rist’s Liebling had garnered €1,515 with Ho Yuhang just behind on €1,330. Tomorrow, UK journalist Michael Gubbins will moderate a panel for professionals and public alike to assess fresh approaches and solutions to the thorny issue of finance, marketing and distribution during a global credit crisis, as well as the evolving roles of the festival as facilitator within these sector disciplines (Jurriaanse Zaal in De Doelen, 15:00 to 17:00 hours). The three Cinema Reloaded filmmakers will be in attendance to discuss and pitch their projects to potential investors before the debate is widened to include highly informed contributions from, among others, The Age of Stupid producer Lizzie Gillett, Barbara Tonnelli (Touscoprod, France) and Jerôme Paillard, director of the Cannes Marché. NC The Re: Reloaded Cinema Reloaded Panel will take place on Sunday 31 January, from 15:00 to 17:00 hours in the Jurriaanse Zaal, De Doelen.
The state of play in the Cinema Reloaded investment stakes as of yesterday evening:
“We have a clear idea about what a war movie is,” critic and programmer of IFFR’s After Victory section Olaf Möller says. “For most people, it means a combat movie. I’m interested in looking back into history and getting people to see something important.” The Signals strand After Victory is Möller’s corrective to this. A collection of 13 features and six shorts packages, it offers a nuanced perspective on war and its consequences as factors that exert power on society, culture and the imagination long after the cessation of hostilities. Structured around four specific crises – the Lebanon war, the Algerian war, the Philippine-American war and the second Sino-Japanese war – its contents range from René Vautier’s Avoir vignt ans dans les Aurès (1961), about young French conscripts, and Bob Clark’s Vietnam zombie satire Dead of Night (1974) to Independencia (2009), Raya Martin’s reimagining of the US invasion of the Philippines in the style of early Filipino cinema. There are innumerable links and connections between the various features and shorts on show, in terms not just of subject matter, but also technique and even specific footage. The accretion of culture and memory are of crucial interest to Möller. “There are layers upon layers upon layers in how history is rewritten and repainted,” he says. “In Independencia, for instance, Raya Martin reimagines a bit of newsreel that never existed, telling a story that was circulating at the time, about Americans shooting children, in the style of the oppressor’s newsreel.” Empathy is also a central concern.“The question posed throughout the programme is whether we can imagine others’ pain. From this point of view, the key film is Gloria Mundi, about an actress torturing herself to gain an understanding of Algerian suffering. And she’s not pussyfooting around, she’s giving herself a good healthy does of electroshock and burning her breast with cigarettes. In the first two minutes!” Möller also stresses the presence of the past today. “History is like a ghost, veterans are the past walking among us. Quite a lot of the directors in After Victory are veterans – there’s an idea of cinema as therapy, getting rid of your nightmares.” But war cannot be easily exorcised. “Look at the Sino-Japanese war, as shown in films like Yasukuni and Nanjing! Nanjing! 70 years on it’s still a live subject – you can follow Sino-Japanese relations through how they react to this event. We shouldn’t think we live beyond history. History’s biting our ass 24-7.” Raya Martin
PROJECT
PROJECT
PROJECT
1
2
3
€ 30.000
€ 30.000
€ 30.000
€ 2,380
€ 1,515
€ 1,330
Alexis Dos Santos
Pipilotti Rist
Ho Yuhang
Filmmakers arriving at IFFR today include: Bahman Ghobadi, Cameron Jamie, François Ozon, Daddy Ruhorahoza, Oliver Schwabe
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CORRECTION Please note that the Film Office’s ‘Make the Most of a Film Festival’ session starts today at 10am, not 11am as stated in yesterday’s Daily Tiger.
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Living colours Simon Rumley, Noah Taylor and Amanda Fuller had a testing time making Red, White & Blue, they tell Edward Lawrenson
Waiting to talk to the Daily Tiger, Simon Rumley, director of the gripping thriller Red White & Blue, and his two leads, Noah Taylor and Amanda Fuller, are discussing the merits of Jim Thompson. The reference point is apt: violent, terse and psychologically complex, Rumley’s movie shares some of the feverish and hard-boiled intensity of the crime novelist’s best work. Set in Austin, Texas, the movie portrays the relationship between Erica (Fuller), a sexually promiscuous, emotionally withdrawn young woman, and Nate, the oddball loner with whom she shares a guest house. When Erica loses her job, Nate finds her in a position in the DIY store where he works, and an intimate (but chaste) kind of attachment develops between the couple, although Nate remains troubled by Erica’s continuing sexual encounters with strangers. An atmospheric, subtly observed character study of these two lost souls, the first third of Red White & Blue grew out of Rumley’s desire to explore “the dark and destructive side of sex”, with Fuller’s commanding performance hinting at a nasty secret underlying her string of one-night stands. Alluding to a violent past Nate – played with scraggy charisma, a wiry beard and a faultless Texan accent by Australian actor Noah Taylor – is also a figure with a mysterious backstory. This rich ambiguity drew both actors to the screenplay, but its dark subject matter provided pause for thought. The sexual and violent subject matter, Fuller explains, called for a cautious approach, especially for an actress at the start of her career; but she was impressed by Rumley’s previous feature, horror film The Living and the Dead, and reassured by meeting the British director. So to commit to a project like this the director has to win your trust? “Definitely,” Fuller says, “You’ve hit the nail on the head.” For Taylor, his concerns were as much logistical: “I’ve done some low-budget films where key scenes
Red, White & Blue
simply weren’t shot but I knew from The Living and the Dead that Simon could deliver.” He also took heart from watching the making-of featurette included on the DVD of Rumley’s last film: “It looked like a smooth shoot and the director of photography did a good job and seemed like a good guy to work with! So I was glad Milton [Kam] was working om this new film, too.” The production schedule – 18 days, Rumley says – was tight, not just because there were quite a large number of locations but also because the film shifts tone mid-way through. To reveal more would be to ruin the film’s unfolding shocks, but let’s just say that its final stretch reveals the
horror credentials of Rumley’s last film. Rumley made sure there was time to discuss his approach to these later scenes with his lead cast prior to shooting; given the challenging material of the script this was especially useful because, Fuller says, “the shoot itself was such a maelstrom. I have barely any memory of it, because we were so busy!” Taylor’s strongest memory was of an incident towards the end of the shoot. “We were doing some shots in Big Bend National park for the end of the film, and we got lost.” The story is jokingly retold by Taylor and involves a Scooby Doo-style van, two flat tires, lack of food and terrain said to
Filmtip van de dag
be populated by many snakes. It was a gruelling day’s travel, and Taylor reflects that he did well to retain his composure. “Luckily, it was one of our last days of shooting,” adds Rumley. Taylor can also be seen in another IFFR title, Richard Lowenstein’s 1986 Dogs in Space, in which the Australian actor made his fleeting debut. Asked about this, Taylor promptly produces a DVD of the film, on which Lowenstein has scrawled an obscene greeting to his erstwhile actor. “In Australia that’s a term of affection,” argues Taylor Red, White & Blue – Simon Rumley
Tue 02 22:30 CI5, Wed 03 21:45 PA5
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Un prophète Fr/It 2009, 150 min. Regie Jacques Audiard Met Tahar Malik, Niels Arestrup 19:00u PA1 In Un prophète volgen we de jonge Malik, die als 17-jarige voor een niet nader genoemd vergrijp voor zes jaar de bak in moet. Les 1 is overleven, en daarvoor moet hij een moslimbroeder vermoorden, want anders wordt hij zelf vermoord door een groep Corsicanen, die de facto de gevangenis runnen. Superieure genrefilm van de regisseur van o.a. Sur mes lèvres (2001), met een doorbraakrol van de jonge acteur Tahar Rahim, die als Malik wel eens de Franse Tony ‘Scarface’ Montana zou kunnen worden.
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