The Film Verdict: Rotterdam Film Festival Wrap Up

International Film Festival Rotterdam

IFFR 2023

IFFR REVIEW DAILY

Festival Wrap

THE AWARDS

TIGER AWARD for Best Film to: LE SPECTRE DE BOKO HARAM

by Cyrielle Raingou

TIGER AWARD: SPECIAL JURY AWARD to: MUNNEL

by Visakesa Chandrasekaram

TIGER AWARD: SPECIAL JURY AWARD to: NEW STRAINS

by Artemis Shaw

BIG SCREEN COMPETITION PRIZE to: ENDLESS BORDERS

by Abbas Amini

AMMODO TIGER SHORT COMPETITION:

PRIZE to: NATUREZA HUMANA

by Mónica Lima

PRIZE to: TITO

by Kervens Jimenez, Taylor McIntosh

PRIZE to: WHAT THE SOIL REMEMBERS

by José Cardoso

Full Awards List

VERDICT: As it finally returned from Covid-19 limbo under new artistic director Vanja Kaludjercic, the Dutch film festival reaffirmed its core mission to promote fresh, socially conscious, culturally rich cinema. Stephen Dalton, February 6, 2023

Rotterdam film festival’s grinning tiger logo was visible right across the city over the last 10 days, signaling a strong physical comeback for the long-running Dutch movie event. Emerging from two years in Covid limbo, the 52nd IFFR kicked off the 2023 European festival season with an impressive reminder of its long-standing heartland mission: promoting new film-makers with a socially engaged, culturally rich, stylistically eclectic agenda. New artistic

director Vanja Kaludjercic has had to wait three years to finally host her first full in-person edition. Following two online and hybrid programs, she showed she means business with a rich, strong selection of international works. With post-Covid budgets inevitably under pressure, IFFR’s film selection was down around 20 per cent this year on previous editions, with greater focus on the two main competition sections.

Continues page 4

Tiger Award winner Cyrielle Raingou “a Source of Wonder”

Interview by Adham Youssef

The Film Verdict: In some of the scenes in Le spectre de Boko Haram, which just won the top Tiger Award at Rotterdam, the children are talking about the Boko Haram attacks while they talk about a football match; how did you manage to create this ease? And how do you emotionally distance yourself while having empathy for the characters?

Cyrielle Raingou: I grew up in a village [in Cameroon] in the Far North Region, and working with NGOs since 2015 I was inspired by the village’s life and the beauty of the space. I wanted to make a film about resisting Boko Haram. In 2018, I returned and started diving into the village’s life, and that is when I met the two kids, Ibrahim and Mohamed. I was struck by this pure innocence, despite their trauma from their encounter with terrorists, and I wanted to tell the story from their perspective.

Africans, for me, are a source of wonder. Having to live with what they are going through and still have a smile on their face. They are so beautiful and have dignity. It’s not that I changed the reality in the film and made them happy. They have problems. They can cry, they can laugh, they have dreams,

and they have expectations about life. I was there to capture this.

TFV: Was it challenging to make a film in a village that is both controlled by the Cameroonian military and had patriarchal structures?

CR: It was challenging, but I was prepared for it. For example, the dress code. When I am in the village, I wear long, modest clothes. My suitcase completely changed, containing African fabric and traditional garments, and I had to cover my hair. I knew I had to be very respectful of the people. Also, the way I encountered the village elders. It is still a very patriarchal

society. There are ways of addressing things; you have to be patient and make them feel you are not changing the way they live and that you know your place as a woman [laughs]. However, when I bring out the camera, I have a particular set of skills and a certain level of knowledge, and from this, I gained respect and appreciation.

In terms of security, I studied law before cinema. I am peculiar when it comes to paperwork and admin stuff. I had my authorization to film from the Cameroonian government in Yaoundé. Before we ever arrived at the village to shoot, the (Continues next page)

CYRIELLE RAINGOU INTERVIEW (Continued)

governorate sent a correspondence every time we went there to film, so they knew that a team was coming from Yaoundé to film. It was also a way to tell them, ‘Hey! We come in peace. We are not there to disturb anything.’ We were honest, and that was very helpful.

TFV: Most films which tackle militancy and radicalization in Africa are graphic and melodramatic as well as explicit in showing the suffering of the victims. Was it a conscious decision for Le spectre de Boko Haram to show mundane daily life despite ongoing threats?

I am a filmmaker because I want to change the narrative of how my people, Africa, have been portrayed since cinema was invented. We are more than this traditional portrayal. Africa is a challenging place. Why do you have to put people down just to please the entities that are funding you every time a camera is taken to Africa?

Also, importantly, I hate the fact that every filmmaker from a developing country must be a political filmmaker. That knocks you into a box that prevents you from being innovative if you are forced to talk about politics.

My film is a statement. It is already a political statement. But I tried to do it artistically, and I don’t want to be locked in this box where every time you make a film, you have to yell, ‘This is Africa. This is how life is. This is how miserable people are. This is how the government is corrupt. This is how the killing is.’

TFV: You work in war zones, and most people might be traumatized by what they see. How did you manage to do your work and not bring back their trauma and bad memories?

TFV: Did this cause you some trouble of not meeting the standards expected from a film about Africa and terrorism?

We struggled with funding this project, mainly with the Francophone funding organizations. They seemed disconnected from the project.

CR: One of the characters, the mother of Falta, witnessed the murder of her husband before her eyes. I knew it would be a very delicate moment when we asked her to talk about it. I spent more time with her, doing nothing, just trying to learn more about her, and then we had a light conversation before arriving at this part. When the daughter asked her what happened, she [the mother] started talking and said, ‘what has passed has passed’. At that moment, I knew that was like saying, ‘I don’t want to talk about it’. She was saying this to her kid and I felt she also answered me, and I never went back to that topic again.

When I see these people Oh wait! my people I feel we need to look inside our humanity. I will not be pushy; I didn’t want them to have memories that leave them with more trauma after the filming. Full Interview

Even so, industry fears that the festival might come back in a more commercial compromise format were quickly dashed. More than 250,000 tickets were sold for a wide-ranging program featuring 242 features, including 97 world premieres, and more than 200 shorts. On top of healthy sell-out audiences at many screenings there were buzzy drinks parties, concerts and audio-visual performances in the bars and venues scattered around the central festival zone.

In keeping with the vision of festival founder Hubert Bals, and the film fund set up in his name following his death in 1988, this year’s program had a broad global focus with adventurous work from Africa, India, Asia and the Middle East. Indeed, the winner of the main Tiger award was The Spectre of Boko Haram by Cameroonian director Cyrielle Raingou, a brave and harrowing documentary about young children growing up under the shadow of the notoriously brutal Islamist terror group. The first Cameroonian director to win a major European festival prize, Raingou is already working on a dramatic feature set in the same beautiful but cursed milieu.

The festival’s other big prize winner, in the Big Screen Competition, Full Wrap

Le Spectre de Boko Haram

NIGHT AND FEAR

VERDICT: Sound and images captured during several years of documentary making form the basis for this haunting essayistic meditation on fear and its effects.

Ben Nicholson, January 26, 2023

Composed of archival materials collected over the past decade of making documentaries in her

home state of Odisha, Lipika Singh Darai’s Night and Fear receives its world premiere in the Ammodo

DAY OF THE TIGER

VERDICT: A runaway tiger means extra trouble for a strife-torn married couple in this engaging but slight Romanian chase drama.

Stephen Dalton, January 26, 2023

A big cat escapes back into the wild, forcing a young married couple to face a calamitous day of reckoning, in Romanian writer-

director Andrei Tanase’s debut feature Day of the Tiger. Partly inspired by a real incident, this emotionally charged chase drama

Tiger Short Competition in Rotterdam. An evocative personal essay, it ruminates on darkness and the kinds of fear that inhabit and are inspired by it. Imagined as a letter to her grand-aunt in the same vein as her 2014 film Dragonfly and Snake, Darai’s new film mediates her own footage to reshape it in the wake of recollections and relationships she has since observed. Recurring in the margins of these other productions are moments of physical and spiritual darkness that coalesce into an enigmatic, disquieting but transfixing reverie.

For much of its runtime, Night and Fear adopts the use of split screens. Darai has referred to this as a way of representing the letter format cinematically – and the notion of the images being in a Full Review

pays minimal heed to the established drab core aesthetic of Romanian New Wave cinema, instead favouring a sunny summer palette, breezy pacing, jaunty music and a light sprinkle of absurdist farce. Screening in the Bright Future section of Rotterdam film festival this week, a dedicated platform for first-time film-makers, Tanase’s creature feature is likeable and engaging, even if it ultimately lacks bite, miaowing when it should roar.

Day of the Tiger begins with Vera (Catalina Moga), a vet based at a zoo in a small Romanian city, helping to sedate and transport Rihanna, a tiger previously kept as an illegal pet by a small-time gangster in his disused swimming pool. Once the new arrival has settled in her cage, Vera heads home via her downtown office, Full Review

VERDICT: Unexpected formal flourishes can only spice up conventional ideas on tormented genius in this take on the life of Norway’s Expressionist painter Edvard Munch.

Carmen Gray, January 25, 2023

Rotterdam, is the first feature film to dramatise the life of the eponymous Expressionist painter.

But it would be wrong to consider this new screen territory. Radical docudrama pioneer Peter Watkins chose the Norwegian artist as the subject of his formally inventive 1974 mini-series Edvard Munch, which has a cult following and a deserved reputation among cinephiles as a masterpiece, despite not having screened widely. It’s no wonder, then, that it’s taken so long for another director to dare the challenge, despite the obvious dramatic potential of a painter who was as famed for his wild and troubled bohemian life as for creating, in violently swirling colour, one of the most iconic images in the history of art, The Scream. Dahlsbakken endeavours to break free from straight-up biopic terrain by enlisting four different Full Review

Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken’s Munch, which opened the International Film Festival

VERDICT: A couple’s farewell dinner in Hanover descends into chaos in this pandemic-era portrait, with a political sting in its tail, of an anxious, divided generation.

Carmen Gray, January 26, 2023

It’s the final night for a young couple in their Hanover apartment. Their belongings are

packed in boxes, ready for their move to Berlin, and they’ve planned a farewell dinner party

despite the pandemic. This also marks a deeper turning point, as they must decide whether to call time on their floundering relationship, or commit to a new beginning. Amid a disastrous string of preparation mishaps, the guests arrive. It initially seems that German director Lukas Nathrath’s feature debut One Last Evening, screening in the Tiger Competition at Rotterdam, will be a somewhat bland and generic romantic drama and comedy of errors. But as unexpected visitors enter the mix, the wafer-thin veneer of politeness collapses, and the film takes on a spikier, politically charged turn. The chaos that ensues serves as a microcosm of Germany in its combustible social divisions, in which personal space is more guarded than ever, and any sense of real community has fractured. Full Review

DRAWING LOTS

Khalvashi, a Georgian filmmaker whose previous work includes the haunting and evocative Namme (2017), about a daughter guarding a healing water against corporate interests. The mysteries of Drawing Lots are more prosaic and worldly.

VERDICT: The black-humoured snapshot of a disorderly Georgian seaside community where love and crime bring scant reward.

Carmen Gray, January 27, 2023

In a yard under a tree in the city of Batumi, a coastal resort on the Black Sea, neighbours gather around a table as numbers are called out in their favoured game of chance. It’s a way to pass the time and challenge fickle fate, and a rare stroke of luck is the only way to beat the grind. Drawing Lots, which has its world premiere in the Big Screen Competition at Rotterdam, is the fifth feature of the late Zaza

ALiEN0089

Writer-director Khalvashi passed away in 2020 before he could see the film fully finished, adding another twist of sadness to its vision of a universe prone to throw a proverbial joker in at inopportune moments to disrupt dreams and best-laid plans. His daughter Tamta Khalvashi stepped in to lead the project to completion posthumously, sharing co-director credit. The result is a snapshot, in a minor key of deadpan humour and gentle melancholy, of a disorderly seaside community where love and crime are irresistible compulsions bearing scant rewards. The film, elegantly lensed in a black-and-white that offsets lives of chaos and indignity, should have no trouble picking up festival slots due to its appealing wry wit and gentle, downbeat humanity.

The camera pans over the rooftops of Batumi, and a neighbourhood in which not much seems to ever work out for the residents in their intertwining lives.

and virtual worlds. A young woman, Sabina (Mariana Di Girolamo), seeks to draw attention to her harassment by aggressive faceless players of an online war game, little realising that there is an intruder watching her inside her own home.

VERDICT: Valeria Hofmann’s uncanny and unsettling film explores the collisions between a video game and the real world, when a young woman attempts to call out online harassment. Ben Nicholson, January 25, 2023

Valeria Hofmann’s new short film ALiEN0089, which premiered at Sundance earlier this month and screens now in Rotterdam, began with a true story. A school friend of the director recounted her harassment at the hands of online gamers and this scenario forms the basis of a troubling, paranoid thriller that permeates the boundaries between real

The distinction between what is game and what is reality – between what is happening online and what is happening ‘away from keyboard’ – is intentionally complicated right from the beginning of ALiEN0089. Films often begin with diegetic sound or voiceover against a black screen, but in this instance, it is a loading screen. What the audience then sees is all from the first-person perspective of somebody breaking into Sabina’s house. The entire experience is modelled on video game aesthetics, mimicking the visual language of the exact game Sabina plays. As the intruder moves around the house and spies on its occupant, they also collect conspicuous objects exactly as a game protagonist would: a beetle in a petri dish, a gleaming golden flick knife.

Recurring fragments of Sabina’s video monologue about her online persecution are heard, while the camera appears to travel in and out of computer screens around the house. Full Review

Born from the creative limitations and social restrictions of Covid-19 lockdown, New Strains is a resourceful exercise in low-

budget DIY cinema which was written, directed, shot, edited and produced by its two stars, Artemis Shaw and Prashanth

Kamalakanthan. Crucially, it is also great fun. Despite a slender, disjointed narrative that never really adds up to more than a hill of beans, this emphatically lo-fi duo inject plenty of goofy charm and visual invention into their first joint feature project.

New Strains was filmed on a vintage Hi-8 video camera, which explains its scratchy look and boxy 4:3 aspect ratio. The directors, who are married in real life, have a background in teaching film theory and screenwriting. There is certainly skill and technique at work behind their surface air of slacker amateurism, alongside pleasing stylistic nods to classic US indie cinema. World premiering in competition in Rotterdam, this genial Generation Z rom-com feels fresh and funny Full Review

VERDICT: Filmed on a tiny camera smuggled into Haiti’s National Penitentiary, this portrait of an inmate is upsetting, enraging, and deeply moving.

Ben Nicholson, January 28, 2023

Kervens ‘Tito’ Jimenez was arrested in December 2006 in relation to a crime that his friend had been suspected of

committing. Detained initially for questioning, he was eventually transferred to the National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince. At

the time of recording the footage in the short documentary Tito, he had been left to rot there –without ever being charged or brought before a judge – for the majority of six years. In 2012 two American filmmakers, Taylor McIntosh and Corbin J. Stone, were trying to produce a longerform documentary about Tito’s situation and provided him with a small camera to capture life inside the prison. Although he was subsequently released, Tito was murdered before that project could be completed but this particular element, a prelude to a tragedy, remains as a powerful portrait in his honour.

While the footage is all very much of the familiar verite, fly-on-thewall variety, it ranges from the camera jostling around, seemingly Full Review

VERDICT: Actor-director duo Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan make inventive use of vintage lo-fi video technology in this slight but hugely charming pandemic rom-com. Stephen Dalton, January 28, 2023

SUPERPOSITION

VERDICT: An isolated Danish family encounter spooky doubles of themselves in this haunting, twistheavy thriller from first-time feature director

Karoline Lyngbye.

Stephen Dalton, January 27, 2023

A troubled young couple take a hazardous detour off grid, literally and metaphorically, in Danish director Karoline Lyngbye’s highly assured debut feature Superposition. A twist-heavy thriller that flirts with familiar psycho-horror tropes while still treating its audience like intelligent adults, this mind-bending exercise in Nordic Noir makes its festival debut in Rotterdam this week, with domestic theatrical release scheduled for March. Positive festival reviews, fan-friendly genre elements and superior Scandi production values should all boost its international prospects.

Superposition initially shapes up like a pretty straight backwoods horror plot, albeit clothed in more highcalibre visuals than usual. Arty Copenhagen

thirtysomethings Stine (Marie Bach Hansen) and Teit (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), together with their young son Nemo (Mihlo Olsen), arrive at a deluxe lakeside holiday cabin in a remote corner of Sweden to begin a year-long hibernation project disconnected from phone, internet or neighbours. Writer Stine plans to use this hardcore retreat to finish her debut novel while Teit is turning their lifestyle experiment into a weekly podcast, posting the USB files back to Denmark from a nearby rural mailbox.

Teit views these confessional interviews as an opportunity for raw, soul-searching therapy sessions with his wife. Stine is less convinced, calling their getaway “spoiled escapism” and the podcast “the most narcissistic premise ever”. Full Review

VERDICT: An oblique, inventive anatomy of an investigation and execution in ‘90s Ukraine, and a legacy of Soviet violence passed down to today’s generation.

Carmen Gray, January 29, 2023

In a dingy underground cell, a man convicted of a police colonel’s murder is shot dead at point-blank range. It’s 1996, and Ukraine has gained independence after the fall of the Soviet Union, but the death penalty persists as a hangover of those times (the signing of Protocol No 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights, which ended capital punishment, would happen a few months after.) The killing is carried out coolly and efficiently, the corpse is whisked out in a body bag, and the floor hosed down, as if this is all a matter of course. And the discoloured tiles suggest this is not the first prisoner to have shed blood here. This state-sanctioned execution is the core around which Ukrainian director Philip Sotnychenko has built his fragmentary, oblique and impressive film La Palisiada, screening in the Tiger Competition at Rotterdam.

An enigmatic opening prologue set in the present day, with a young generation of Ukrainian artists, culminates in another shocking gunshot. Sotnychenko leaves it to the audience to connect the dots between the film’s many episodes and digressions, refusing to simplify a society that speaks the language of absurdities and redundancies. But the thrust of his mosaic is fiercely clear: Russian colonialism didn’t end with the collapse of the USSR. Its brutal legacy never brought culture to Ukrainians as its propaganda professed, but only fear and trauma. Full Review

VERDICT: Director Jessica Woodworth's monochrome anti-war drama is visually stunning but weighed down by its ponderous, pretentious tone.

Stephen Dalton, January 29, 2023

Visually ravishing enough to excuse its more jarringly pretentious excesses, Luka marks a kind of homecoming for Belgian-American writer-director

Jessica Woodworth and her regular collaborator

Peter Brosens, credited as producer here. The duo are film festival stalwarts best known internationally

for their mockumentary comedies King of the Belgians (2016) and The Barefoot Emperor (2019), but they originally specialised in sombre, arty travelogue dramas. Shot in luminous monochome tones on Sicily, this eye-catching literary adaptation is very much in the serious camp.

Staged and choreographed like an avant-garde theatre production in places, Luka aspires to the lofty cerebral heights of old-school art-house heavyweights like Bergman, Tarkovksy and Bela Tarr. Inevitably it falls short, too often mistaking ponderous, humourless solemnity for intellectual depth. That said, this is still an absorbingly beautiful, admirably high-minded work with solid festival credential and niche theatrical potential following its Rotterdam world premiere this week.

Woodworth freely adapts Luka from Dino Buzzati’s 1939 novel The Tartar Steppe, a Kafka-esque fable about an Italian soldier at a frontier fortress who initially yearns for a “hero’s death”, before the years begin to fall away and the futility of his existence becomes painfully clear. Resonating across the ages, Buzzati’s book has both Full Review

VERDICT: An ageing footballer reflects on his career in this layered rumination on the nature of the beautiful game adapted from the filmmaker’s own short story.

Ben Nicholson, January 29, 2023

The protagonist of Adrian Duncan’s short film Prosinecki – and of the short story of the same name from which it is adapted – is an unnamed footballer in his mid-thirties, playing for an unnamed team in the north of England. While a teammate is treated for an injury, this player’s mind wanders back to his teenage years, his professional peak playing for a club in Germany, and to his childhood idol, the Croatian midfielder Robert Prosinecki. Using archive material and a mellifluous abridged narration of the story by Wendy Erskine, Duncan crafts an entrancing and affecting portrait of an individual and a thought-provoking meditation on the tension between pragmatism and aestheticism – in football and beyond.

The original story is an incredibly poignant one, as the footballer drifts off during a break in play to recall his time playing at the height of his powers in Germany some decade earlier, remembers advice given to him as a youth about to sign his first professional contract, and looks back on arrogant past actions in the light of attempting to emulate his hero. At this moment, he decides that his finest act –an outrageous piece of skill against a team from Dresden years previous, in which he humiliated an opponent – is in fact his greatest sin. Prosinecki had a reputation for flair but with age, the protagonist has come to realise he always made the moral decision; he chose the right pass in service of the game, not preening displays of unnecessary skill for adulation. In this sense, Prosinecki is held up by the player as a god – his alpha and omega, who was both the source of his youthful inspiration and his older, sober revelation. Full Review

COPENHAGEN DOES NOT EXIST

A troubled young man consents to being held virtual prisoner and subjected to daily interrogation about his missing girlfriend in Danish director Martin Skovbjerg’s stylish second feature Copenhagen Does Not Exist. Adapted from Terje Larsen’s 1998 novel Sander, this cryptic psychological thriller borrows the moody, fatalistic grammar of Scandinavian crime drama as it seeks to solve what initially looks like a murder mystery with no body. But it ultimately delivers a more universal meditation on love and loss, grief and guilt, truth and lies, all told in hazy flashbacks by unreliable narrators.

VERDICT: A young Danish woman mysteriously vanishes in director Martin Skovbjerg's smart, stylish blend of sensual romantic drama and brooding suspense thriller.

Stephen Dalton, January 30, 2023

Adapted from a 2015 graphic novel of the same name by Juan Saenz Valiente, Southern Storm begins as a blend of familiar modes – South American social realism, a detective story – but keeps its audience off balance with both its narrative and tone. Making their first foray into fiction after a couple of documentary collaborations, Carack de nacar (2013), The Exact Shape of the Islands (2014), directors Daniel Casabe and Edgardo Dieleke dexterously navigate the waters of this strange and ultimately uplifting mystery. Set in a humid but lonely Buenos Aires and the rising tides of the Rio de la Plata Delta this is part-procedural, partmetamorphosis.

There is hardly a better way to succinctly sum up the film’s protagonist, Jorge Villafanez (Juan Carrasco), than with the moniker this gumshoe goes by; ‘The Hound.’ While business seems to be going well, life is perhaps less fulfilling for Jorge. Full Review

World premiering in Rotterdam film festival this week, Copenhagen Does Not Exist is a classy and compelling work, even if it sometimes feels a little too pompously glum and over-styled. Sumptuous visuals, genre-friendly suspense elements and the healthy global fanbase for Nordic Noir thrillers should all boost theatrical prospects. Full Review

SOUTHERN STORM

VERDICT: A cynical private detective becomes enthralled by a woman he is been paid to surveil in this unconventional and tender tale based on Juan Saenz Valiente’s graphic novel.

Ben Nicholson, January 30, 2023

GAGALAND

VERDICT: A street dance craze becomes a way of life for kids live-streaming from the social margins, in this psychedelic celebration of self-expression.

Carmen Gray, January 29, 2023

Gaga Dance has become a whole way of life for the disenfranchised kids on the social margins who have embraced it, in Chinese filmmaker Yuhan Teng’s wild feature debut Gagaland, screening in the Tiger Competition at Rotterdam. The freestyle form of street dancing, whose practitioners break out moves

to whatever sound is around as shopkeepers look on skeptically from their doorways, has become a TikTok phenomenon, with big-name stars and rival houses. Psychedelic and hugely entertaining, this music-driven blizzard of rapid editing, split screen, and cosmic virtual backdrops takes boundless joy in the mindbending possibilities of digital-era wackiness. It is a bold celebration of creative self-expression as a way to rise above social oppression, as its tight-knit hive of Gaga enthusiasts use the money they earn from online subscribers to escape factory exploitation and homelessness. The frenetic and fluorescent, scrappily DIY onslaught may prove too dizzying for some fans of more classical cinema. But it has an underlying humane commitment to the dignity of the down and out, and is one of the more successful efforts to approximate networked life on-screen. It should find ample slots at festivals on the more formally adventurous side, and have no trouble finding its cult fanbase.

K.D. (Qian Jiannan) is a Mongolian migrant. He was working in a duck-down jacket factory, where he was bullied, until some homeless people helped him to get out of this grueling arrangement. Full Review

VERDICT: Revolution is coming in this intricate, densely layered vision of the burning of a forest and the girl who harnesses the technology of dissent.

Carmen Gray, January 26, 2023

A fire blazes through the forest and lights up the night sky around El Mansouria, the homestead near Tangier of the wealthy Bechtani clan. It’s not initially clear who set it, but the family suspects that it is the work of Bab Al Sama, an unscrupulous real estate developer intent on turning the land into a profitable construction zone, despite the ecological consequences. Birdland, screening in the Tiger Competition at Rotterdam, is the second featurelength fiction film of Moroccan director Leila Kilani, who more than a decade ago made Sur la Planche (2011), about women in Tangier factories trying to supplement their meagre incomes, and has made a number of documentaries about poverty, state violence and dissidence. Her latest film is an intricately woven vision of collapse and regeneration that blends the politically trenchant with the poetic and mystical. The spite and intrigue of family dynasty melodrama is a suspenseful hook, and is elevated by a wider cosmic perspective of esoteric connections, significances and signs, and the unstoppable forces of social revolution.

We see this enchanting and cursed world through the spectacled eyes (and the live-streamed footage she shoots on her phone, when it takes over the frame) of the youngest Bechtani, Lina (Ifham Mathet). She is rebellious like her father Anis (Mustafa Shimdat). He has blocked the family’s attempt to sell the estate, resorting to North African “habous” law, according to which he can stipulate his share must be put to good social use through a charitable foundation. He does not want to see the land taken from the slumdwellers down the hill, Full Review

VERDICT: Banishments cannot stave off knowledge in this visually bold fable about a colony of children insulated from death and memory.

Carmen Gray, January 28, 2023

A group of children live as a self-sufficient commune on an island cut off from the rest of the world in A Primeira Idade (which means “The First Age” in English), screening in the Bright Future section at Rotterdam. Each Solstice they banish the oldest among them into the surrounding forest, so there are never any adults in the colony. They believe that whoever leaps off the great rock on the other side of the wilderness into the sea will transform into a fish with eternal life, and they train with this moment in mind. This is the feature debut of Portuguese filmmaker Alexander David, who has appeared as an actor in the work of João Pedro Rodrigues and others on the independent scene. There is a strong thread of pagan weirdness running through the film, though this remains on the level of unnerving atmosphere, and doesn’t descend into the all-out folk horror terrain of Rob Hardy’s The Wicker Man or Ari Aster’s Midsommar, films it inevitably brings to mind.

There is a vague, disconcerting blankness to this youthful tribe, who gather greens for meals and play games, but seem disconnected from any real purpose. It could hardly be otherwise. With no spoken language or historical memory, they’ve been unable to forge a coherent sense of identity. On the level of plot, this leaves us frustrated with little back-story to orient us. How they came to be here, and what exactly happened to their ancestors, is a mystery, though a monster, who guesses his own age to be around 500, and is prone to gazing out to sea from the clifftop in a reverie, obliges us by recounting in his whispery voice-over a few scraps of local legend. The fable is thin on facts, but sensorily beguiling, Full Review

VERDICT: An outlandish, radical trip inside Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa's mind, gorgeously realised as a mysterious office of alter-egos and clacking typewriters.

Carmen Gray, January 31, 2023

To adapt any beloved author’s novel for the screen is notoriously difficult. But to be so bold as to base a film on the fragmentary and esoteric outpourings of Fernando Pessoa, famed for The Book of Disquiet and other works that made him a giant of twentiethcentury literature, might just be approaching madness. Luckily, madness is a terrain that Portugal’s Edgar Pera, an idiosyncratic director known for his wild experimentation, feels at home in. Não Sou Nada

The Nothingness Club, screening in the Big Screen Competition at Rotterdam, and termed by Pera a “cinenigma”, is a radical, outlandish and gorgeously realised noir-style mystery and trip into the mind of the Lisbon-born poet and philosopher, who wrote under a number of different personae (which he called “heteronyms”). Perhaps too bizarre and conceptual for wide release, this film will nevertheless have no trouble finding its audience, especially among fans of Pessoa charmed to see his strangeness done justice.

HUMAN NATURE

Though there is never a boring minute, to audiences with no prior knowledge of Pessoa’s alter-egos, aphorisms and singular philosophies, the whole bonkers set-up will doubly confound.

The metallic clack of old-fashioned typewriters and dramatic piano chords soundtrack this world, an office of varnished wood and mirrors, where a fleet of men are all dressed alike in suits and fedora hats, with the poet’s signature glasses and moustache. We see by his nametag that the heteronym Ricardo Reis (Vitor Correia) is among them. Full Review

Monica Lima’s beautifully observed new drama, Human Nature, a young couple are divided on how best to move forward after the failure of their latest attempt to conceive. They are torn between an innate urge to have a child and a creeping anxiety about bringing one into the world as it currently is. Surrounded by a flourishing garden they’ve cultivated; questions of procreation and propagation surround them in this delicate golden-hour snapshot of a couple at a crossroads.

VERDICT: A couple reflect on a failed pregnancy in the midst of the pandemic in Monica Lima’s tactile and delicate drama about the desire to nurture and propagate.

January 31, 2023

For people all around the world, life came to something approaching a standstill during the curtailed movement and social opportunities of the world’s various lockdowns caused by Covid-19. In

“Maybe it’s enough,” says Xavier (Joao Vicente) when he consoles his wife, Alba (Crista Alfaiat) about their latest unsuccessful attempt to get pregnant. She insists that she wants to keep trying but it becomes clear that Xavier has his reservations. As a peacock roams the city streets and Xavier’s wider environmental concerns are brought up at dinner, the fragile equilibrium of their household – and the planet more broadly – seems to come into stark relief. Far from melodrama, though, Lima’s screenplay, written with Goncalo Branco, is patient and subtle; the tension remains authentically understated. Full Review

NÃO SOU NADA - THE NOTHINGNESS CLUB

VERDICT: Matti Harju’s debut feature is a hypnotic slowburning anti-thriller that is more interested in exploring disillusionment and social imbalance than narrative twists or action spectacle.

Ben Nicholson, January 31, 2023

It is evident from very early on that Natura is going to unfold in a measured, un-showy way. Written, directed, shot and edited by first-timer Matti Harju, it may have a premise that screams home invasion thriller, but if this can even be cajoled into the ‘crime’ genre, it’s far more about the underlying causes and unexpected consequences of that crime than the excitement or jeopardy of the deed itself. Understated in almost every department, it’s full of decisions that confound expectations, where it turns the camera away at the moment others would zoom in. An oddly serene and cerebral take on a familiar set-up, it’s the kind of film that will yield much if audiences are patient enough to see it.

That aforementioned set-up involves two men, Kentsu (Jarmo Kämäräinen) and Markus (Asko Lintunen) who found each other

online amidst their personal crises of stagnation and futility. “Nobody is coming to save you,” intones Markus on one of their video calls. As a result, they have decided to travel to the home of a crypto millionaire (Juha Lilja) to hold him hostage and steal his wealth. They’re quite different men. Markus comes across as more of an ideologue, the man with the plan who otherwise spends his days picking up litter in the local park, reminiscing about a bad experience with processed foods, and contemplating his – presumably unfair – place in the world.

Kentsu is introduced on a phone call in which he interrogates his girlfriend about a neighbour who

offered to mow her lawn and later he reminisces about having sex in a house they drive past –moments afterwards he sighs, perhaps lamenting former glories, before declaring that he doesn’t “understand anything anymore.”

Most of this information has to be gleaned from fragments of conversations or intuited from physical performance as Natura is not a film that lays out its narrative with exposition. In fact, to a large extent, Harju eschews both the ‘tell’ and ‘show’ of the famous filmmaking adage. Even when the plot kicks into gear and they break into the man’s home with a pellet gun and a drill, the editing leaves crucial events to be pieced together. Full Review

NATURA

FOUR LITTLE ADULTS

clandestine infidelity are challenged. The film’s benign, broad humour and glossy lightness slyly serve its subversive intent further, normalising polyamory for a mainstream audience in easily digestible packaging. Those familiar with the Finnish director’s previous festival success Hobbyhorse Revolution (2017), a documentary about a community of teens who groom and ride toy horses, will not be surprised that she has chosen to empathetically spotlight another unconventional lifestyle choice.

VERDICT: This entertaining rom-com offers a freshly subversive, anti-bourgeois twist on the genre, as a pastor and politician in Helsinki open up their marriage to non-monogamy.

Carmen Gray, February 1, 2023

A pastor and a politician in Helsinki agree to open up their marriage and see other people, in Selma Vilhunen’s entertaining Four Little Adults, screening in the Big Screen Competition at Rotterdam. It takes the romantic comedy-drama into decidedly edgier thematic territory than one would normally expect from the genre, as bourgeois conceptions of the nuclear family and the moral hypocrisy of

VERDICT: Prize-winning French novelist Alice Zeniter makes a confident directing debut with this lively mystery drama about bed-hopping bohemians in emotional crisis.

Stephen Dalton, February 2, 2023

Feted French author and screenwriter Alice Zeniter makes her co-directing debut with Before the Collapse, a compelling tangle of personal and political stories set in contemporary Paris and Brittany. Best known internationally for her prizewinning 2017 novel The Art of Losing, Zeniter is working in tandem with her husband Benoît Volnais here. Together they wrap a fairly straight story of thirtysomething angst in sharp-eyed social critique and playful literary devices including chapter divides, wry voice-over commentary and occasion breaks in the fourth wall. World premiering in Rotterdam this week, this lively emotional rollercoaster ride is set for domestic release in April. The buzzy profile of its author and rising-star cast should generate healthy art-house interest in other territories too.

The very public roles of parish priest Matias (Eero Milonoff) and Member of Parliament Juulia (Alma Poysti) raise the stakes considerably as they navigate the complex and evolving terrain of desire and commitment, aware spotless reputations are deemed indispensable to their careers. As the film opens, their current set-up of promised monogamy is no longer working. Matias has been in a year-long affair with Enni (Oona Airola), a single mother who works at a publishing house, who he shares wild nights with. He adores her, but also loves his wife, and is invested in raising the young son they have together. Juulia is devastated when the secret comes to light, but neither of them see divorce as an attractive solution to a seemingly impossible situation. Full Review

BEFORE THE COLLAPSE

At heart, Before the Collapse is a fairly familiar Gallic melodrama about arty young Parisians in romantic, sexual and ethical turmoil.

Viewer enjoyment levels will partly depend on how tiresome you find self-absorbed young-ish bohemians and their bed-hopping dilemmas. Zeniter does not excuse her characters for their occasional navel-gazing narcissism, but she treats them sympathetically, allowing for complexity and contradiction. Full Review

UNDER THE HANGING TREE

minimalism. Much of the narrative feels stagey and remote when it should be chilling and gripping. That said, this is a refreshingly original and often sublimely beautiful film. Following its world premiere in Rotterdam this week, it should appeal to festival programmers and African cinema aficionados, not least as a welcome rare gem from Namibia, whose tiny film industry has produced just a trickle of features since breaking free from South African rule in 1990.

VERDICT: A murder investigation in Namibia is haunted by echoes of colonial genocide in Perivi John Katjavivi's flawed but intriguing supernatural crime thriller.

Stephen Dalton, February 1, 2023

Set in the majestic rural hinterland of Namibia, Under The Hanging Tree is a rare murder thriller where the slaughter on screen is overshadowed by a much larger real-life crime from over a century ago. Writer-director Perivi John Katjavivi packages this story as a contemporary film noir, but it is rooted in the first genocide of the 20th century, when German colonial forces massacred around 100,000 Herero and Nama people between 1904 and 1908. This large-scale exercise in ethnic cleansing helped lay the blueprint for the Holocaust decades later, and remains a highly contentious issue between Germany and Namibia even today.

As the son of a black Namibian politician father and white English mother, Katjavivi is well-placed to interrogate the deep scars of European colonialism in Southern Africa from an informed insider-outsider viewpoint. Under The Hanging Tree approaches this material from an elliptical angle, adding hints of supernatural horror and magic realism, not always a good fit for the film’s leisurely pace and mannered

Cloaked in an ominous, almost Shakespearean sense of portent, Under The Hanging Tree opens with an old Herero man (David Ndjavera) crouched under the stars beside a flickering fire, his ritualised incantation summoning his ancestors to bless their children and avenge historial crimes against their people. The narrative focus then cuts to Christina Mireti (Girley Jazama), a young police detective who is also of Herero heritage but living a modern urban existence, cut off from tradition. Katjavivi presents his heroine as sullen, silent and withdrawn, perhaps hinting at her colonised and deracinated mental state.

Christina’s latest crime case takes her away from the city and deep into the bush, presented here as a majestic widescreen canvas against which humans are reduced to insignificant grains of sand. In uneasy partnership with local police officer Hosea (Dawie Engelbrecht), she visits a murder scene at the farm of a white family who are descended from the original German settlers. Even though her husband’s mangled body now dangles from a “hanging tree”, a site associated with colonial atrocities, Eva (Roya Diehl) appears eerily calm.

After this slow-burn set-up, Under The Hanging Tree takes a jarring left turn into gothic horror terrain in its closing stages, when a tense showdown at the farm escalates into a bloody reckoning over German colonial crimes. Full Review

THREE SPARKS

VERDICT: A sensitive, intricately layered and hand-crafted portrait of mountain life in northern Albania, women’s labour and ancient laws.

Carmen Gray, February 1, 2023

Naomi Uman’s Three Sparks, screening in the Tiger Competition at Rotterdam, is a highly personal, hand-processed record of what transpired when she journeyed into the mountains to film life in the north of Albania, a region notorious for its ferocious dogs, but whose people (both Muslim and Christian) live

side by side relatively peaceably. The American experimental filmmaker, who is very much in the frame, claims that she would scarcely have been able to carry out her project in the village of Rabdisht were it not for “besa”, the pledge of honour and duty to look after guests that is a cornerstone of Albanian culture, and which allowed her to feel safe as a solo female traveller and a Jew (the protective emphasis of “besa” led to the Jewish population expanding there during the German wartime occupation, as nearly two thousand were saved from Nazi persecution.) Uman’s potentially intrusive presence as an outsider, and the way power dynamics play out with a camera, are concerns that, with self-aware sensitivity, she explores, producing a fascinating ethnographic portrait of rural Albania and a meditation on documentary filmmaking as a craft with its own sacrifices, customs and consequences. Festivals giving space to documentary on the more creative end of the spectrum should snap up this intimate, beautifully textured record of the work of women, and the stories that define them. Full Review

PLAYLAND

VERDICT: The ghosts of Playland Cafe, Boston's oldest gay bar pre-demolition, return in this heartfelt, multi-layered tribute to marginalised history, DIY spirit and queer performance.

Carmen Gray, February 2, 2023

With their haunting and heartfelt feature debut Playland, screening in the Tiger Competition at Rotterdam, director Georden West has created along with their queer cast and crew a spectral memorial to the Playland Cafe and its regulars. Before its 1998 closure, it was the oldest gay bar in

Boston. Lady (Danielle Cooper), clad in head-to-toe leather, sits in a booth in the empty establishment on the eve of its demolition, and conjures ghosts of its past decades. Established in 1937, Playland was a meet-up spot for a uniquely diverse community until aggressive urban renewal drives led to it losing its entertainment license and being sold off to developers. In its resurrection of a boozing hole that served as a lifeline to the marginalised, West’s film is in a similar spirit to Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, the recent docufiction and festival success by Turner Ross and Bill Ross IV that lamented the aggressive erasure of places of meaning by chain-store commercialisation. But while the Ross brothers’ Las Vegas dive-bar was a pure invention to convey a general tendency of gentrification, West honours real and specific history of targeted oppression, basing their film on research carried out at Boston’s LGBTQ archive, The History Project. This inventive, multilayered assemblage of archive and performance should easily find slots in festivals granting space to LGBTQ and community history, appealing especially to those feeling cultural precarity keenly and mourning the loss of beloved venues that has accelerated in the pandemic era. Full Review

KILLING A TRAITOR

Deborah

Bound to be interpreted as a blatant metaphor for the mass rebellion now sweeping the

streets of Iran and claiming lives, Killing a Traitor (Khaen Koshi) is ostensibly an emotional

recreation of an ill-conceived bank robbery staged 70 years ago by a group of high-minded, college-educated partisans and working-class supporters of the new prime minister, who was promising sweeping social reforms. Perhaps this pro-reform sentiment is the reason why the current Iranian government confiscated the passport of 82year-old director Masoud Kimiai at the airport and prevented him from boarding a plane to Rotterdam to be present at the film’s international premiere. It is the latest attack on the creative freedom of filmmakers, one that will certainly boomerang and increase interest in this difficult film.

Kimiai’s 30th movie is a wild and confusing ride through American Full Review

VERDICT: Acclaimed Iranian director Masoud Kimiai pours cinematic rage into his recreation of a 1952 politically-motivated bank robbery that resonates with the protests of today.

Young, February 2, 2023

VERDICT: Director Ami-Ro Sköld blends live action with stop-motion animation in this impressive social drama, which takes place in a Swedish supermarket.

Stephen Dalton, January 25, 2023

A cut-price supermarket becomes an emblematic battleground for 21st century class struggle in The Store, a lightly experimental blend of social-realist drama and eerie stop-motion animation from Swedish writer-director Ami-Ro Sköld. The action take place in a nameless Swedish town, but it could be anywhere in the western world where poorly paid service jobs are filled by a multi-racial underclass of unskilled workers and immigrants.

Sprawling past the two-hour mark, The Store takes too long to make some fairly blunt and obvious points about the evils of consumer capitalism. Even so, this is a commendably thoughtful, quietly angry feature elevated by a strong ensemble cast and clever use of animation as a kind of counterpoint commentary on the live-action scenes. Building on its low-key festival launch late last year, Sköld’s impressive hybrid drama is screening at IFFR in Rotterdam this week. More festivals are likely to take an interest, with domestic release scheduled for April.

The anti-heroine at the centre of The Store is punky single mother Eleni (Eliza Sica), an ambitious young manager being groomed for promotion by her callous corporate boss Karsten (Fredrick Evers). The Faustian price of this “opportunity” means Eleni is under increasing pressure to neglect her newborn baby, slash worktime rotas, impose zero-hours contracts and fire less productive employees, some of whom are her friends. Inevitably, each new turn of the screw amplifies friction between the store staff, Full Review