The Film Verdict: Rotterdam Festival Day 2 Jan 26, 2023

International Film Festival Rotterdam

IFFR REVIEW DAILY

ONE LAST EVENING

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. While it’s not a big reveal that identity clashes have been heightened in Covid times, especially when conveyed in the film’s broad-brush terms, it is refreshing to see a German take on partying youth that digs deeper than the generic Berlin hipness, to show a millennial generation under heavy psychological pressure.

The Berlin relocation is in the cards because Lisa (Pauline Werner) has a role lined up at a leading university hospital, where she is to become a neurologist. While she is a driven achiever, her partner Clemens (Sebastian Jakob Doppelbauer) is the more sensitive and artistic of the two. A musician with one minor local hit, he’s been struggling with a crisis of self-confidence and feelings of inadequacy since a stint in a psychiatric facility, and has a pattern of self-harming.

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TFV Talks to Jolinde den Haas

What is IFFR Pro immersive to you? What does this new form of media mean for the future?

The Pro Immersive program is a section of our coproduction market where we support immersive projects in different stages of development whether they be VR, XR, or AR. We get them a platform and help them find a path to production.

We started in 2016 by partnering up with VR days which is a B2B program. By connecting their more tech and VR network we diversified our output. 2017 is the first time we had immersive projects in Cinemart, the oldest coproduction market of its kind. Out of approximately 400 projects in development, we select 15-20 which we present to the industry and help them make their next steps. We see a lot more interest coming from our industry guests. The synergy we wanted to create was not immediately embraced, but now more and more it is.

My view is that immersive media will play a big part on how we experience film. It will only take up more space and be more present. People will have a device and it will be normal to experience a film like this casually.

Pro Immersive offers a new way to engage with traditional film forms, what kind of demographic are you seeking to reach? The younger generation of film fans? Or the traditional crowd who is perhaps interested in discovering what new technology has to offer?

The virtual reality in our program is a finished work. Here we have a new target group with a new, younger audience. However, we see interest coming in from traditional producers and in the audience.

It will happen quicker than we think; within our generation. The synergy that exists, the interest there is; I am very optimistic about it happening in our generation. Accessibility is key.

A facet of new media, Virtual Reality (VR) allows for a new kind of interaction with more standard norms, such as in Confident, where you take a rather interesting Sci-Fi concept and place it into the hands of the viewer to interact with. It is a mixture of game and cinema, something we have been seeing more of recently. Can you speak more on the possibilities of this kind of creation?

I would like to see it becoming more group-focused – people could experience these things together. Somehow you are in a VR world together while simultaneously having a group interaction. VR is changing day to day, the people who are working

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ONE LAST EVENING (Continued)

The guests thrown together around the dinner table are easily recognisable stereotypes of modern-day German life, but inhabited with enough conviction to make them sufficiently credible. Nadja (Amerlie Schwerk) is an alternative healer whose boyfriend, to her dismay, wants an open relationship; Aaron (Valentin Richter) works in advertising and sees the world in terms of branding; Marcel (Nikolai Gemel) is an Austrian actor who has been kicked out of the State Theatre due to a scandalous performance. Meanwhile, Jan (Julius Forster), a well-off medical student with a not-so-secret crush on Lisa, can barely hide his disdain for Valerie (Isabelle von Stauffenberg), a flaky backpacker with leftist views and activist leanings two characters who present the possibility of something different for Lisa and Clemens. Class differences cut deep, compounded by personal jealousies. The real stand-out is older, enigmatic writer Katherine (Susanne Dorothea Schneider), a neighbour who was a stranger to them before the party, and who is grieving a lost brother.

The loneliness of not being understood is a constant refrain. A poster of “Seated Woman with Bent Knees,” an artwork by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele, hangs on the wall a picture that everyone interprets differently, as one of the guests puts it. In the same way, the film functions as a Rorschach test of sorts for the prejudices and sympathies of the audience.

Full Review

JOLINDE DEN HAAS (Continued)

with it are so creative that they are continuously evolving the form and will eventually allow this to become the norm.

Cosmos Within Us started in Cinemart and then premiered in Venice film festival. An experience where you follow a man with dementia who goes through his life, has flashbacks; you smell things, touch things, and then if you book a behind the scenes look you get to sit with the orchestra which brings it to life. You see them play music as people explore this project; adjusting, improvising at the speed at which an individual audience member engages with the art. The problem is how to make this commercial. How do you make money with it? It is hard to make your money with these kinds of projects.

“Taking Action” is a rather provocative way to describe Virtual Reality – you are no longer passively consuming

entertainment; you are playing a role in it. This is one of the foundational elements of gaming, which has become the most lucrative media business on earth. How do you see viewers “taking action” in future incarnations of this form of entertainment?

If I go by the change in the past five years, the interaction will only continue and increase. New technology creates a grander imagination. Duchampiana, one of our projects, invites women to climb the infinite staircase, rather than going down it. An empowerment and reversal of the classic trope of descending a staircase as a woman.

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– Daniel Gusinski

TVF Senior Critic Stephen Dalton all set to review at IFFR

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

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

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 writerdirector Andrei Tanase’s debut

feature Day of the Tiger. Partly inspired by a real incident, this emotionally charged chase drama pays minimal heed to the established drabcore 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 donwtown office, where she witnesses her actor husband Toma (Paul Ipate) having sex with another woman.

Full Review

MORE FILMS AT IFFR

GODLAND

Vanskabte Land / Volaða Land

VERDICT: Magisterial in the manner of 19th century epic novels and visually influenced by that era’s photography, Hlynur Pálmason’s third feature is a stunning, psychologically rich tale set against Iceland’s awe-inspiring landscapes.

FUNNY PAGES

Funny Pages A24

VERDICT: Actor turned director Owen Kline's assured debut feature is a slimy, grimy comedy of failure and awkwardness.

VERDICT: Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski conjures a donkey of a film out of the promising premise of seeing a chaotic, cruel world through a braying animal's eyes.

LOVE ACCORDING TO DALVA

Dalva

VERDICT: Director Emmanuel Nicot's assured debut feature navigates dark subject matter with compassion, warmth and great performances.

Snowglobe

© Aneta Gebska, Filip Gebski

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