By Jason Sanders

“Rotterdam is a militant festival for film as art, in all its variations,” wrote festival director Sandra den Hamer in her blunt take-it-or-go-back-to-Sundance introduction to this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, which, like its 34 prior incarnations, rolled out a dizzying whirl of shorts and features, narratives and documentaries, zero-budget debuts and Hollywood epics, discussions and installations and more in its newly “streamlined” program, down from 300 full-length features to a “mere” 250. Split between six or seven venues, not counting the museums, art galleries, bars and clubs that the festival also gleefully invades, the IFFR still offered 90-100 different events to confuse and bedazzle every day, each of which, as den Hamer writes, “continue exploring the idea of ‘what is cinema?’” Super 8mm filmmaking retrospectives from Japan and Hungary? The “projector band” Wet Gate performing with 16mm loops and mirrors? The newest 35mm glories from Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Philippe Garrel and Manoel De Oliveira? The talent-rich, budget-less digital video what’s-its from emerging Filipino directors like Khavn and John Torres? Maybe an interactive television performance piece, or a museum’s multichannel video installation? In the bleary-eyed, never-resting world of the IFFR, cinema doesn’t just have the possibility to be all those things; it already is.

One of Rotterdam’s most endearing, eccentric practices is to give all its filmmakers equal billing and equal access, a tradition that is unfortunately unique in the festival world. Unlike others, which pamper established filmmakers and their per-diemed posses while allowing “unknowns” to fade into the backdrop, Rotterdam has as much time for the director of a three-minute Super 8mm film as it does for Steven Soderbergh and Terry Gilliam (in town this year for Bubble and Tideland, respectively, while Gilliam also stopped by to giddily introduce the premiere of Jan Svankmajer’s crazed de Sade-with-chopped-meat-puppet-tongues Lunacy). “The rest of the year is all about stars, so, please, for 12 days let’s focus on different things,” den Hamer pleaded. “This festival is about the 370 filmmakers here that we think are the stars of the future. This is very much a festival in which the maestros of world cinema are presented on an equal footing with young filmmakers.”

Stumbling through the smoke-filled lobbies and beer-stained lounges of the festival, most young filmmakers found the going exhilarating, if a little chaotic. “Besides the fact that the festival staff was kind and helpful, the overall vibe of the fest is incredibly down-to-earth and inclusive,” noted director Michael Tully, in Rotterdam for the world premiere of his gritty Cocaine Angel. Set amid Florida’s drug subculture, Tully’s film captures the flip side of the Sunshine State: there’s nothing but dimly lit cracks and shade-drawn homes for its coked-up hero as he stumbles from hit to hit, supplier to denier. As the film’s roiling, hyper-eloquent antihero, Damien Lahey combines a Bad Lieutenant stagger with a Woody Allen mouth, spitting out rambling, giddily inventive monologues while looking like death. Screened in the festival’s White Light sidebar on drugs and cinema, Cocaine Angel is caked with a legitimate, unforgettable grime, one that makes similar Hollywood efforts seem as fake as an orange juice commercial. “I don’t think we could have world-premiered our film at a better festival,” recalled Tully to Filmmaker. “At a bigger, more industry-focused festival, an effort like ours would almost certainly get swept under the rug. But at Rotterdam we were treated with the same respect as the heavy hitters.”

Somewhere between Cocaine Angel’s grimy charms and the festival’s polished “heavy hitters” lies the IFFR’s Tiger Awards Competition, for first- and second-time filmmakers. This year’s winners were Han Jie’s Walking on the Wide Side, from China; Manolo Nieto’s The Dog Pound (La Perrera), from Uruguay; and Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, fresh from Sundance. All three were linked by a fixation on drifting, purposeless heroes: Han Jie’s film follows three Chinese youths from a dead-end mining town as they take off from the law; La Perrera concerns a scrawny teenage boy, mainly famous for his talent at masturbation, struggling to find common ground with, or at least respect from, the macho, muscle-brained laborers that surround him.

Old Joy tracks two old college friends, one a homeowner husband who’s about to become a father, the other seemingly utterly “free,” who set off on a camping trip. Along the way they remember old friends, talk about records but listen to talk radio, engage in petty lies and get lost trekking along a mountain that seems, like them, caught between two minds. “Doesn’t even matter where you are; now there’s trees in the city and trash in the forest.” While a quick blurb (an indie-rock Brokeback Mountain? A Blissfully Yours of the Pacific Northwest? A Granddaddy memorial film, complete with a forest of broken household appliances?) might certainly address the film’s uncanny feel for nature and theme of male bonding (or male separating), Old Joy offers more indescribable fascinations, not the least of which is musician Will Oldham’s strange, mesmerizing performance.

Allowing its young stars to shine and its old masters to sparkle, IFFR also branched out to spotlight an entire national cinema, in this case the Philippines. Writer Noel Vera coerced and begged his way through several national film archives and Filipino production houses to curate an overview of Filipino cinema history, while young directors like John Torres (Salat), Raya Martin (A Short Film About the Indio Nacional) and the single-monikered Khavn (Bahag Kings) arrived to represent the present and future. The poet of the trio, Torres composes his fragmented short films like love songs, addressed to all those absent — friends, fathers, or lovers — and overcome with a similar lonesome, melancholy refrain. Leaving Torres’s modern Manila of thwarted lovers and unsettled hearts, Martin’s Indio Nacional returns to the Philippines of the 1890s, examining the lives of three men during the colonial era. Shot in stately B&W long takes, Martin’s work recalls the films of Bela Tarr and Martin’s countryman Lav Diaz, but with an eye for composition and detail all his own.

Last but never least, there is the crazed peyote-man of the group, Khavn, whose talent leads one to imagine if the Kuchar brothers or John Waters had been born in the Philippines, raised on a steady diet of eighth-generation VHS b-movies, and came of age in the time of digital, not film. Gleefully tackling the kind of topics that others politely step around, stained with the sort of lurid colors that most people are taught to avoid, and filmed with a good-natured shrug towards technical virtuosity, Khavn’s works put all the fears and desires of the id onscreen, and then wallow in them. What separates them from similar “distasteful” projects, though, is the filmmaker’s evident talent, and his surprising empathy for his subjects, his topics, and the world around him.

Bringing a little William Castle-like ballyhoo to Rotterdam, Khavn walked around the festival (and its 30 degree January climate) wearing only a “bahag” (loincloth) to promote his Bahag Kings, prompting the sort of shocked stares and discussion that a million-dollar publicity budget could never buy. “Rotterdam programs things other festivals won’t dare touch with a 10-foot pole. And with gusto!” Khavn wrote to Filmmaker from Manila, where he’s working on the feature Mondomanila. “Rotterdam is just the right size for an indie filmmaker like me, not too big to get lost in, but not too small.”

At its 35th year and running, Rotterdam has come a long way from its debut in 1972, when 17 people attended opening night. This year over 358,000 admissions were recorded, but while the festival has grown, it hasn’t lost its heart. As Khavn points out, though, “there are still more boundaries to push, more limits to break.” As the San Francisco Bay Area group Wetgate performed one Friday night, its three members (Peter Conheim, Owen O’Toole, and Steve Dye) each operating a 16mm projector, forming and reforming little fragments of images and sounds from forgotten films, linking them up, breaking them down, and reprojecting them through mirrors onto their homemade “Skinnimascope” screen, one could see the Rotterdam audience looking on, intrigued. Wetgate brings the concept of “projecting films” from the back of the theater to the front, and reassembles it before the audience’s eyes. Sometimes bits of film break or cues are missed, but that’s part of the exploration and part of the fun of seeing boundaries pushed, objects retooled and film reworked into something it wasn’t before. Most festivals would never imagine that that is “cinema,” but for Rotterdam, cinema — and a film festival — is all of that, and more.