Rotterdam film festival’s grinning tiger logo was visible right across the city over the last 10 days, signalling a strong physical comeback for the long-running Dutch movie event. Emerging from two years in Covid limbo, the 52nd IFFR kicked off the 2023 European festival season with an impressive reminder of its long-standing heartland mission: promoting new film-makers with a socially engaged, culturally rich, stylistically eclectic agenda. New artistic director Vanja Kaludjercic has had to wait three years to finally host her first full in-person edition. Following two online and hybrid progams, she showed she means business with a rich, strong selection of international works.
With post-Covid budgets inevitably under pressure, IFFR’s film selection was down around 20 per cent this year on previous editions, with greater focus on the two main competition sections. Even so, industry fears that the festival might come back in a more commercial compromise format were quickly dashed. More than 250,000 tickets were sold for a wide-ranging program featuring 242 features, including 97 world premieres, and more than 200 shorts. On top of healthy sell-out audiences at many screenings there were buzzy drinks parties, concerts and audio-visual performances in the bars and venues scattered around the central festival zone.
In keeping with the vision of festival founder Hubert Bals, and the film fund set up in his name following his death in 1988, this year’s program had a broad global focus with adventurous work from Africa, India, Asia and the Middle East. Indeed, the winner of the main Tiger award was The Spectre of Boko Haram by Cameroonian director Cyrielle Raingou, a brave and harrowing documentary about young children growing up under the shadow of the notoriously brutal Islamist terror group. The first Cameroonian director to win a major European festival prize, Raingou is already working on a dramatic feature set in the same beautiful but cursed milieu.
The festival’s other big prize winner, in the Big Screen Competition, was Iranian director Abbas Amini’s Endless Borders, a slow-burn thriller about exiles, migrants and ethic tensions on Iran’s border with Afghanistan. With IFFR falling in the same week that Jafar Panahi was finally released from prison after taking the desperate decision to go on hunger strike, Amini’s brooding frontier drama had unavoidable political resonance, even if that was not his intention. In the current volatile climate, the murderous Islamic Republic government is increasingly paranoid about any film that could be taken as critical, even banning 82-year-old veteran director Masoud Kimiai from travelling to IFFR to for the premiere of Killing a Traitor, a period crime thriller set a gainst the backdrop of the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh. By suppressing these artists, of course, the regime only boosts their profile and importance in the wider cinematic world.
IFFR also has a strong visual art and digital art dimension, with locations across the city serving as outdoor sculpture and installation sites during the festival. A welcome new venue in this year’s program was the stunning Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen museum, a kind of deconstructed art gallery where public exhibitions co-exist alongside storage spaces and restoration workshops for private collections. Opened in 2021, this magnificent bowl-shaped mirror palace hosted one of IFFR’s more unusual commissions, Sunshine State, a new large-scale video work by film-maker Steve McQueen. This powerful piece blends manipulated clips from groundbreaking 1927 musical The Jazz Singer with memories of a violent racist incident that McQueen’s father kept secret for most of his life, only sharing it on his deathbed. Blurring the line between visual art and cinema, public and private, this feels like the Oscar-winning director’s most personal work to date and is sure to travel internationally.
We live in serious times, and IFFR felt like it rose to the challenge by addressing weighty themes and timely issues. Among the other main prize-winners was La Palisiada by Philip Sotnychenko, a fatalistic murder thriller about the lethal legacy of Soviet rule in 1990s Ukraine, and the short film Tito from co-directors Kervens Jimenez and Taylor McIntosh, a tragic posthumous portrait of a wrongly imprisoned teenage boy in Haiti. But the festival also had its lighter, fun moments too. Picking up a smaller Jury Prize in the Tiger competition was New Strains by married duo Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan, a witty lockdown rom-com shot on vintage fuzzy Hi-8 video, which felt like a throwback to the quirky lo-fi indie cinema of 1980s New York.
The Film Verdict team was also impressed by Georden West’s queer fantasia Playland, an inspired experimental fusion of drama, documentary and hallucinatory dreamscape paying homage to a legendary Boston gay bar. And we enjoyed the richly aromatic pleasures of Okiku and the World by Sakamoto Junji, a black-and-white love story set in Edo-era Japan, about a shy schoolteacher’s romance with the man who collects human sewage for use as farming manure. This foul-smelling but ultimately sweet tale of fecal attraction was one of the left-field gems in a richly enjoyable, wide-ranging, frequently surprising festival. If the prevailing emotion among Rotterdam insiders at the start of the rebooted IFFR was sheer relief, the mood at the end was quietly triumphant.