By Jason Sanders

Takashi Miike's HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS

It's not just any film festival that ends its awards ceremonies with a jury chair and world-reknowned filmmaker serenading the audience with impromptu Taiwanese karaoke, but that's exactly how the International Film Festival Rotterdam brought its 2002 edition to a close. Hou "Velvet Fog" Hsiao-hsien's spontaneous lyricism may have been inspired by the Dutch royal wedding down the road in Amsterdam, or possibly by the warm reception given to his new rave-scene film Millennium Mambo; more likely, though, it was inspired by having just witnessed one of Rotterdam's strongest line-ups in years.

Somewhat surprisingly for a festival that has become known for highlighting Asian cinema, Rotterdam's 2002 Tiger Award winners, who receive $10,000 and a Dutch distribution deal, hailed from Romania, the Czech Republic and Holland. Romanian Sinisa Dragin's Everyday God Kisses Us on the Mouth has one note to hit – life is brutal, short and incomprehensible – and it hits it hard and often. The film follows an almost accidental serial killer across a countryside drained of color and hope. Shot in murky black-and-white and paced like a slow crawl through someone else's sewer, it remains admirably extreme in its bleakness.

Hitting different notes was the Czech Wild Bees, Bohdan Sl·ma's bittersweet merging of youth-of-today ennui with a Menzel-inspired tale of a sweet little village caught in a time warp. While the older generation drinks, tramples through forests and celebrates at fireman's balls, the younger generation searches for a way out – either by moving to Prague, becoming Michael Jackson impersonators or, if all else fails, getting even more drunk than their elders. More bemused than biting, it joins the recent Eeny Meeny and Return of the Idiot (from which it shares several actors) in limning a hopeful "New" Czech New Wave.

Holland's Sleeping Rough also discovers some amount of hope in its two fractured characters, a pissy, elderly Dutch man and a quiet, young Sudanese immigrant. Director Eugenie Jansen brings a documentary approach to the film, revealing the men's isolation, loneliness and their slow-building but ultimately surprising friendship.

A CHRONICLE OF CORPSES

Several new American features also appeared in the mammoth Rotterdam program. An international premiere, Andrew Repasky McElhinney's A Chronicle of Corpses thankfully ignores nearly every trend of recent American cinema, turning away from traditional narrative models and instead embracing a seemingly forgotten aesthetic gleaned from early Kuchar Brothers, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Edgar G. Ulmer. McElhinney serves up a horror melodrama set within an 1807 Philadelphia colonial plantation. Eschewing cool crane shots or hip hand-held camerawork, he instead freezes his 16mm camera into place, filming in static long takes and encouraging the actors to deliver their lines as if hypnotized, in the manner of Herzog's Heart of Glass. A genius display of Brechtian manipulation, or possibly amateurish, A Chronicle of Corpses is nonetheless highly personal and wholly original.

Tracking today's current indie film malaise to its "educational" roots, Douglas Underdahl's Film School Confidential received its world premiere in Rotterdam's "Looking Glass" program, which showcased films about filmmaking. Introducing a cast of entertaining idiots and incompetents, from the addicted-to-metaphor "visionary" to the drug-fueled "rebel" who winds up directing commercials, Underdahl's film displays as fine a grasp of visual aesthetics or cinematic originality as some of its characters but nonetheless offers a fine, amusing diversion.

Following a different, far uglier malaise, however, was the world premiere of Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky's Horns and Halos. A documentary examining one underground New York publisher's attempt to republish a suddenly withdrawn, unflattering biography of George W. Bush, it exposes the casually offhand relationship between politics, power, media conglomerates as well as the slime that oozes between them. Revealing the fallacies of using your own underground press to tackle Big Capital, Hawley and Galinsky (previously known for their indie-music narratives Half-Cocked and Radiation) skillfully merge the publisher's and book author's stories to make the personal political, and vice versa. Horns and Halos was well received at Rotterdam, as was another American tale, John Gianvito's The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein. Programmed in Rotterdam's politically themed "Desert of the Real" section, Gianvito's film revisits the Gulf War, fusing fiction and documentary to examine life in another desert town, Santa Fe, as war breaks out a world away.

Much discussed this year was Carlos Reygadas's Japon, a Mexican film shown in the Hubert Bals Fund section, which spotlights emerging filmmakers from underdeveloped nations who receive production financing from the festival. (Most visiting festival programmers, in fact, pointed to the Bals section as the most revealing and rewarding of Rotterdam.) A desert epic shot on Super-16mm scope with heavily saturated black-and-white images, Japon tells the story of a man who disappears into the countryside to die. But while the character's fate may be undecided, Reygadas's certainly isn't; Variety tipped his film to jump from Rotterdam straight to Cannes.

Argentina's Bolivia, about the racism and hardship that a Bolivian immigrant experiences as a dishwasher in Buenos Aires, also caught the eye of international fest programmers. Its sure pace and eye for detail marked it as one of the strongest films yet from Argentina's recent neo-realist wave, a wave that, as several Argentine directors in Rotterdam proclaimed, could be at an end thanks to that country's recent economic collapse.

A different kind of collapse could be found in South Korea's One Fine Spring Day. Like a Smiths's song brought to gaudy life, Hur Jin-Ho's feature pours, almost embarrassingly, over the minutae of being dumped by a lover. Its astonishing, heart-on-its-sleeve premise threatens at times to turn it into some kind of male weepie, but its eye for detail, fine acting and obsessed single-mindedness likens it to a great over-dramatic pop song. Another South Korean entry, Jeong Jae-Eun's Take Care of My Cat, deserves special mention, not only for being one of a handful of Korean films directed by women, but also for setting its tale within the working-class town of Incheon rather than the usual slick Seoul backdrops.

Out of Japan rumbled Sono Sion's Suicide Club, a sort of companion piece to last year's cult sensation Battle Royale. Fifty schoolgirls stand on a Tokyo train platform; as the train arrives they jump in front, ensuring enough death, mayhem, fake blood and flying body parts to make Herschell Gordon Lewis proud. Soon every schoolkid in Japan wants in on the latest suicide fad, leaping off buildings or into trains. Meanwhile, in a deserted bowling alley littered with little girls stuffed inside body bags, a sinister glam-rock band controls it all. Exploitation at its most cheerfully ripped-off, Suicide Club makes Roger Corman look like Ingmar Bergman.

No Rotterdam article would be complete, of course, without mention of the Japanese kino-bomb Takashi Miike, and this year's wrap-up would be incomplete without discussing the four Miike films (out of seven completed in the last year) shown at the festival. Previously screened in Vancouver, Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q unspooled to typically boozed-up, mouths-agog audiences. Having their world premieres were Agitator, an almost straight-ahead (for Miike) classic yakuza film, complete with rival gangs, loyal hitmen, betrayals and a jar-dropping array of truly nauseating men's fashion, and The Happiness of the Katakuris, a musical with claymation interludes involving a peaceful Japanese family who just can't stop the guests in their mountain lodge from dying. "This is a karaoke movie!" screamed Happiness's producer at the premiere before launching into an impassioned number from the film. Miike himself stayed to gauge the alternately pleased and bewildered reaction from the Rotterdam crowd. Hidden near the front of the theater, humming to himself, he demonstrated what Hou Hsiao-hsien would confirm at the closing ceremonies: this year's Rotterdam festival – its films, activities, friendly staff and overall feeling of comraderie – could bring anyone to song.