The final weekend of public screenings and closing festivities may still be underway, but the mood at the 53rd Rotterdam film festival right now is a muted mix of elation and exhaustion. The main prizes have been awarded, the star guests have flown home, and the first major European festival of 2024 is switching gear from work-heavy mode to one-last-party escapism.
Most regulars seem to agree this was not a vintage edition of IFFR in terms of splashy world premieres, with the fringe sections showcasing more interesting, innovative work than the main competitions. All the same, this felt like a solid consolidation after last year’s post-Covid comeback, with its reduced film program and attendant job losses. Only in charge since 2020, the festival’s director Vanja Kaludjercic has survived a bumpy initiation, and continues to wrestle with financial issues. That said, this year’s screenings have been generally well attended, and after-show cinema bars buzzing into the small hours, while immortal superstar guests like Debbie Harry even brought a dash of old-school pop-queen glamour.
By accident or design, IFFR seems to have taken a more traditional turn this year. In contrast to much of the festival world over the last 18 months, urgent global events like the wars in Gaza and Ukraine only figured marginally in the program. The big prize winners were solidly crafted, novelistic dramas, all made by male directors and more personal in tone than the politically charged fare that usually appeals to festival juries.
Winner of the Big Screen Competition was Iranian director Oktay Baraheni’s The Old Bachelor, a claustrophobic family saga about intergenerational friction with heavy echoes of classic Russian literature, superbly acted and full of brooding tension, but also slow and stagey. Picking up the main Tiger Competition Prize, meanwhile, was the lyrical Japanese emo-drama Rei, which charts a tortuous romance between an office worker and a deaf landscape photographer. Impressively, first-time director Tanaka Toshihiro is also the writer, producer and co-star on this low-voltage but quietly moving love story.
Both The Old Bachelor and Rei stretch beyond three hours, something of a recurring motif at Rotterdam this year. Winning a Special Jury Prize in the Tiger section was another three-hour marathon, Indian director Midhun Murali’s technically dazzling animated feature Kiss Wagon, a visually arresting fable that combines shadow-puppet characters with densely detailed digital collages. Innovative animation was another recurring theme across the festival program, including another prize-winner by another Indian director, Ishan Shuka’s Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust, which uses computer-game graphics to create a surreal dystopian thriller.
Chilean director and multimedia artist Niles Atallah also combined acerbic social critique with stop-motion animation in his mesmerising post-apocalyptic parable Animalia Paradoxa. Atallah’s bleak contemporary fairy tale sat comfortably alongside Rotterdam’s dedicated focus on Chilean cinema, which included vintage ruminations on revolution, dictatorship and exile from Patricio Guzmán, Raul Ruiz, Helvio Soto and more. Another sidebar featured a career-capping retrospective by uncompromising Hong Kong queer director Scud, aka Danny Cheng Wan-Cheung, who also world premiered his final film, Naked Nations: Tribe Hong Kong.
While most of this year’s IFFR program met with a mixed critical reactions, one unifying title was Flathead, Australian director Jaydon Martin’s lightly fictional documentary about damaged souls coming together in a small Queensland town. Filmed in gorgeous monochrome, Martin’s remarkable debut earned wide critical acclaim and a Special Jury Award. Indeed, this has been a strong year generally for documentaries in Rotterdam, from straight biographical works like veteran LA director Billy Woodberry’s Mário, a profile of Angolan revolutionary poet Mário Pinto de Andrade, to more adventurous essay-films on cinema and its deeper cultural undercurrents. The TFV team were particularly impressed by Daniel Mann’s Under a Blue Sun, which critically re-examines the filming of Rambo III (1988) under military supervision in Israel’s Negev desert, and Amanda Kramer’s So Unreal, a trippy deep dive into the dark prophecies of vintage cyberpunk cinema from Blade Runner (1982) to The Matrix (1999) and beyond.
Visitors to Rotterdam will instantly notice that this is an art-friendly city filled with world-class galleries and public artworks, so it makes sense that the festival continues to broaden its agenda to explore the crossover between cinema, visual art, AI and VR. This year the IFFR screened the first ever full film retrospective devoted to Scottish visual artist Rachel Maclean, including the world premiere of her mind-bending new animated short Duck, in which Maclean herself plays multiple computer-generated “deepfake” versons of Marilyn Monroe, Sean Connery, Daniel Craig and other James Bond veterans. The effect is surreal, self-aware, darkly funny and slightly creepy. Like all great film festivals should, Rotterdam left viewers both shaken and stirred.
