FESTS



 

International Film Festival Rotterdam

Photo from Suzhou River, a Tiger Award-winner at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Even in a year with few major new films on display, the International Film Festival Rotterdam is still a major event. Created almost 30 years ago as an alternative culture paradise by the legendary curator Hubert Bals, it has always been considered the most radical home for the cinematic arts in the world. The Festival has embraced artists as diverse as Stan Brakhage and Mani Kaul, asking only that filmmakers push the medium to its furthest extent. Throughout, the large and patient audiences of Rotterdam have demonstrated an unflagging taste for mad and outrageous filmic adventures.

Today the festival is run by another legendary curator, Simon Field. Before moving to Holland a few years back, Field transformed London’s Institute of Contemporary Art’s sleepy film program into a world leader in the discovery and promotion of cinema. He is especially revered as the man who brought Takeshi Kitano to the West.

When he began his stint as director, Field combined this thirst for discovery with a museum-oriented impulse for important retrospective programming. On the discovery side, his idea to create a forum for new talent bore fruit immediately with the creation of the VPRO Tiger Awards: three prizes are awarded annually to specially selected first and second features presented as (at least) European premieres at the Festival. A wealth of excellent cinema issued from these awards in Field’s first few years; this year there were less. The only film that seemed truly significant was Tiger-winner Lou Ye’s atmo-

spheric love story Suzhou River, which blends the urban melancholia of Shanghai life with the memerizing romanticism characteristic of New Chinese cinema. Another Tiger went to the excellent, brutally austere Crane World, which shows evidence of a renewed vitality in Argentine cinema (although with the film having premiered in Venice months ago, the shine of that award was slightly tarnished.) The final Tiger was awarded to Bye Bye Bluebird, a standard-issue yarn about punk girls going to the countryside and learning about their past.

Rotterdam has been bruised badly in its proxy war with the Berlin Film Festival, and the result has been the loss of many important new films. Berlin takes place a week or so after Rotterdam, and the Festivals used to have a much more co-operative relationship. Once, for example, Berlin’s Forum for New Cinema allowed several key films to be presented at both festivals, but that cooperation has ceased. In addition, Rotterdam’s impressive thrust into the upper echelons of the festival world a few years ago has been fought by Berlin through a terrifying scorched-earth, rearguard policy of snapping up as many new films as possible and demanding world premieres for each one.

But if the Festival’s films have faltered, Field has more than compensated by creating the most impressive collection of retrospectival programming seen in some time. Individual programs devoted to the overlooked Brazilian radical Julio Bressane — his Killed the Family and Went to the Movies launched the Cinema Marginal movement and is one of the strangest and most harrowing films ever made — and Serik Aprimov, godfather of the fascinating Central



 
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© 2005 Filmmaker Magazine