The Film Verdict: Rotterdam Film Festival Day 4 Jan 30, 2023

International Film Festival Rotterdam

IFFR REVIEW DAILY NEW

pleasing stylistic nods to classic US indie cinema. World premiering in competition in Rotterdam, this genial Generation Z rom-com feels fresh and funny enough to score healthy festival buzz and art-house distribution potential.

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

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

Still in the awkward early stages of their relationship, endearingly dorky twentysomething bohemians Kallia (Shaw) and Ram (Kamalakanthan) arrive in New York City for a short holiday. Almost immediately, the latest wave of an unnamed Covid-style pandemic brings a strict new travel ban into force, grounding the couple at Kallia’s uncle’s apartment for the foreseeable future. As time slows down, Ram becomes increasingly paranoid about infection risk, throwing a jealous tantrum after Kallia runs into an old flame in a nearby park. The giddy buzz of new love soon descends into childish bickering, sulks and mood swings.

Between arguments, Kallia and Ram also share tender moments, have sex, experiment with baking, take online fitness classes, watch terrifying TV news bulletins and lose track of time. Full Review

A Reflective Steve McQueen

VERDICT: The Oscar-winning director and Turner prize-winning artist draws parallels between Hollywood's historic racism and his own father's lived experience in his latest cinematically huge art-work 'Sunshine State'.

Stephen Dalton, January 28, 2023

Long before he became an Oscarwinning film director, Steve McQueen’s visual art career was always intertwined with cinema. Often working directly with video projection and short film formats, he drew early inspiration from the French New Wave, Andy Warhol and Buster Keaton.

So it seems perfectly fitting that the 53-year-old director of Hunger (2008), Shame (2011), 12 Years A Slave (2013), Widows (2018) and the much-feted TV drama series Small Axe (2020) is

here at Rotterdam film festival this week to unveil his latest artwork, Sunshine State McQueen’s giant two-channel video installation was originally commissioned by IFFR for the festival’s 50th anniversary last year, only to be postponed by the pandemic. It has now become the first work to fill the cavernous fifth-floor exhibition space in the city’s magnificent new art palace, Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, a towering bowl-shaped edifice clothed in mirrors.

Sunshine State is another of McQueen’s cinematic homages, only this time the artist is explicitly drawing parallels

between real-life racism and Hollywood’s troubled history of racist imagery. The main visual material is drawn from the landmark 1927 musical The Jazz Singer, widely considered the first “talkie”, which has become increasingly contentious due to Al Jolson’s use of blackface make-up and minstrel performance. But McQueen cleverly manipulates, tweaks and reverses clips from the film so that Jolson’s darkened face becomes totally transparent during these scenes.

“I just liked this idea of erasure,” McQueen explains at the Rotterdam launch event. “What I (Continues next page)

STEVE MCQUEEN (Continued)

didn’t want was to present any references to blackface, because what he’s doing is erasing. There’s never any evidence or appearance of traditional blackface, he is either erasing himself or making himself appear.”

Sunshine State is arguably McQueen’s most personal work to date. It may reference The Jazz Singer as inspiration, but the narration is its emotional core. In

it, the artist himself shares a longburied memory that his Trinidadian father only revealed on his deathbed, about how he almost lost his life in a dramatic racist incident in 1950s Florida. Retold in multiple iterations, it ends with a moving poetic flourish from McQueen: “Sometimes it felt like my father was holding me back. After he told me that story, I realised he was holding me tight.”

McQueen says the family story behind Sunshine State is both singular and universal, pointing to endless daily news reports of violence against people of colour, including the horrific police murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. “It’s a very personal story but at the same time it’s not, unfortunately,” he nods. “This is kind of common.”

McQueen also confesses he is not sure his late father would have encouraged his career as an artist. ““I think he would much rather I had become a mechanic or a builder or a carpenter, because these are skills that are essential, these are jobs no-one can take away from you,” he says. “These are not worlds dominated by white people’s judgement about if you are good or not. Like the art world, where they can pull the carpet from under you any time they want.”

Full Profile

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

A PRIMEIRA IDADE

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 selfsufficient 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 allout 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, Full Review

Cinemart 2023

Brace Yourself

2023 Selection

108 Days

Directed by Lucky Kuswandi, Indonesia

7 P.M. on a Sunday,

Directed by Sevgi Eker, Finland

Apetown

Directed by Kurt Orderson, South Africa

Boifriend

Directed by Jack Goessens, United Kingdom

CineMart is IFFR Pro’s co-production market, where a carefully curated lineup of projects in development are presented to international industry representatives. Bold independent feature film projects are launched onto the market, along with select Immersive (XR) projects. Together they receive vital mentorship and networking opportunities.

20 feature films and 5 immersive projects will be presented to the international film industry and given the right connections to bring them to reality. Following two online editions, the market takes place in person for the first time since 2020. Filmmakers from Indonesia, Paraguay, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ukraine are found amongst the lineup which features hip-hop, migration, gender fluidity and a cowboy.

108 Days

The Burning Giants

Directed by Phuttiphong Aroonpheng,Thailand

BraceYourself

Directed by Thati Pele, South Africa, Netherlands

Cerro Corá

Directed by Francisco Márquez, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil

ConsiderVera

Directed by Marina Stepanska, Ukraine

Eldorado

Directed by Alaa Eddine Aljem, Morocco, France

Eyes Closed

Directed by Jenneke Boeijink, Netherlands

CineMart runs Jan 29 - Feb 1

Immersive Ancestor

Kids Only 2023

On Sunday, 29 January, young film enthusiasts can attend Kids Only, a fun film festival programme put together especially for children aged 8 to 12 and their chaperone. You can travel the world from the comfort of a cinema seat, and get some hands-on experience during a creative workshop.

You can choose between a morning programme (from 10:00 to 11:45) or a full day programme (from 10:00 to 16:00). During the morning programme, children – together with their chaperiones – will watch an exclusive, international programme full of animated, fiction and documentary short films.

If you choose the full day programme, the screening is followed by a lunch for everyone, and then the children take part in a film-related workshop while their parents watch a festival film. To round off the day, all chaperones are invited to watch the results of the workshop together.

The workshop will be provided by Digital Playground who will guide the children into making their own film trailer. The adults will be watching the film Un petit frère, from the Limelight programme strand.

Please note that this programme is in Dutch. Films are either spoken in Dutch or with Dutch subtitles.

Both the morning programme and the full day programme start in Pathé 2 at 10:00.

MORE FILMS AT IFFR

CAIRO CONSPIRACY

formerly 'Boy from Heaven'

VERDICT: Sweden's shortlisted International Oscar hopeful, which is now known as 'Cairo Conspiracy', is a solid though cautious, slow-burn loss-of innocence tale wrapped around the struggle between State versus Religion, designed for Western consumption. designed for Western consumption.

NOSTALGIA

Nostalgia

VERDICT: A pair of bohemian sisters build a machine that can change the future in Andrew Legge's flawed but admirably ambitious lo-fi sci-fi oddity.

NO BEARS

Khers Nist

VERDICT: Mario Martone directs an emotional terror tour through Baroque, Camorra-ridden Naples, where actor Pierfrancesco Favino has a rendezvous with destiny.

VERDICT: The world premiere of Jafar Panahi’s simple but militantly engrossing ‘No Bears’, which comes to grips with the thin line between art and reality, took place in Venice competition while the director remained in prison in Tehran after his second arrest on July 11.

LOLA Medusa Deluxe

Picomedia

Venice Film Festival