Wind, Talk to Me
Stefan Djordjevic’s sensitive doc portrait of grief and nature’s endless capacity for renewal is a gem of small gestures and surreal moments.
Rotterdam
Fiume o morte!
Igor Bezinovic engages citizens of his Croatian hometown in a rigorously researched, irreverently punk re-enactment of its brief occupation by Italian poet and self-styled dictator Gabriele D’Annunzio.
Un gran casino
Daniel Hoesl’s latest skewering of the excesses of the mega-rich is a mesmeric and doomy doc hybrid about the Casino di Campione, Europe’s largest casino.
Wondrous is the Silence of My Master
Ivan Salatic’s magnificently moody, intelligent and doom-laden vision of Montenegrin freedom fighting and exile questions the formation and undoing of national myth.
The Assistant
Wilhelm and Anka Sasnal channel the spirit of cult modernist Robert Walser in this strange, caustic “repainting” of his novel about a beleaguered assistant.
The Legends of Eternal Snow
Sakha cinema pioneer Aleksei Romanov reworks an eerie Yakut tale for an intriguing mix of ethnographic detail, anti-imperial defiance and bone-deep chill.
TFV talks to Tiger Award winner Cyrielle Raingou
Raingou’s first feature, ‘Le spectre de Boko Haram’, is a moving documentary that views the horrors of terrorism through the eyes of children.
International Film Festival Rotterdam 2023
As it finally returned from Covid-19 limbo under new artistic director Vanja Kaludjercic, the Dutch film festival reaffirmed its core mission to promote fresh, socially conscious, culturally rich cinema.
Three Sparks
A sensitive, intricately layered and hand-crafted portrait of mountain life in northern Albania, women’s labour and ancient laws.
Four Little Adults
This entertaining rom-com offers a freshly subversive, anti-bourgeois twist on the genre, as a pastor and politician in Helsinki open up their marriage to non-monogamy.
Não Sou Nada — The Nothingness Club
An outlandish, radical trip inside Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s mind, gorgeously realised as a mysterious office of alter-egos and clacking typewriters.
La Palisiada
An oblique, inventive anatomy of an investigation and execution in ‘90s Ukraine, and a legacy of Soviet violence passed down to today’s generation.
A Primeira Idade
Banishments cannot stave off knowledge in this visually bold fable about a colony of children insulated from death and memory.
A Human Position
A young woman struggles to process personal trauma and wider social injustice in Norwegian director Anders Emblem’s slender but quietly haunting drama A Human Position,
Blue Has No Dimensions
Ágata de Pinho impresses both in front of and behind the camera in this visceral drama about a woman who believes she will disappear on her 28th birthday.
The Dream and the Radio
Canadian filmmakers Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia Rousiouk pay tribute to Stan Brakhage, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard and Pedro Costa in an intriguing experimental exercise looking at the history of cinema and old-school political activism.
Kung Fu Zohra
French director Mabrouk El Mechri’s screwball action comedy about domestic violence, Kung Fu Zohra is admirably audacious but misses the target.
The Last Ride of the Wolves
Alberto De Michele artfully deglamorises the gangster film, constructing instead two interlaced stories around a man’s complex relationship with his father and the latter’s plans for one last heist.
To Love Again
The vestiges of politically-instigated past trauma come back to trouble an older couple in their second marriage as they begin ruminating on their demise in Gao Linyang’s subtly crafted, detail and performance driven feature debut.
Drifting Petals
The history of Hong Kong and its seething democratic movements is interwoven with a cryptic ghost story in Clara Law’s challenging film about memory and political struggle.
Excess Will Save Us
French debutante director Morgane Dziurla-Petit returns to her home village for the playful and poignant docu-fiction hybrid Excess Will Save Us.
Third Grade
French auteur Jacques Doillon returns to form in this endearing, small-scale chronicle of abuse and friendship between two kids from different social classes.
Singing in the Wilderness
A bittersweet chronicle of Miao farmers who form a Christian choir in the remote mountains in China, and who are recruited to perform nationally while gradually losing their lands, autonomy, and identity.
I Get Knocked Down
Retired pop star and former anarchist Dunstan Bruce tries to rekindle his youthful punk rage in the charmingly offbeat music documentary I Get Knocked Down.
Malintzin 17
Eugenio and Mara Polgovsky gently comment on the cycle of life in an observational documentary shot through a window in Mexico City.
Give Me Pity!
Amanda Kramer recreates a 1970s-style variety TV special to comment on a certain kind of diva celebrity, but the results are tediously self-indulgent, clueless about camp affect, and open to claims of disingenuousness.
My Emptiness and I
This fictionalized portrait of a trans woman’s emotional journey towards selfhood tries to cover too many bases in the psychological process, but Raphaëlle Perez’s sympathetic performance and the film’s overall sensitivity make up for some of its flaws.
Daryn’s Gym
Brett Michael Innes’ third film, set mostly at a gym in Johannesburg, goes down easy and would be fun for the family—as long as you keep the kids away.
Phantom Project
A pleasant though minor queer-skewed indie slice-of-life look at Millenials in Chile, using a ghost device as a way of concretizing the niggling concerns within a struggling actor’s subconscious.
Please Baby Please
Andrea Riseborough, Harry Melling and Demi Moore celebrate the hidden queerness of vintage Hollywood in Amanda Kramer’s WTF retro-musical Please Baby Please.
The Island
Robinson Crusoe goes musical in a deliciously disorienting brain-teaser from feted Romanian animation director Anca Damian.
Drive My Car
Winner of the Academy Award for best international feature, Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘Drive My Car’ is the story of how love survives death in a long, measured, ultimately mesmerizing examination of the human soul.