It is way past midnight in the sleepy German university town of Oldenburg, where a wild-haired gang of guitar-shredding noise-rockers in luminescent monster masks are tearing through David Bowie’s “Hello Spaceboy” at face-melting volume. The band is VHS From Space, fronted by Belgian film-maker Jérôme Vandewattyne, one of the guests at this landmark 30th edition of Oldenburg Film Festival. The walls of this crowded art-gallery venue are daubed with sci-fi slogans alongside official festival posters that playfully parody classic cult films, inserting cats into reimagined scenes from A Clockwork Orange, Apocalypse Now and more. This feline mascot is something of a long-standing motif in Oldenburg. Indeed, neon signs dotted around the town proclaim the festival’s rebel manifesto: Rules Are For Dogs.
Founded and hosted by Torsten Neumann, with support from his Canadian screen star partner Deborah Kara Unger and a team of eager volunteers, Oldenburg is one of the last film festivals still carrying a torch for independent cinema as a punky, pulpy, slightly transgressive artform. This creates a program that is often variable in quality, but refreshingly different from more mainstream movie gatherings, where tastefully middlebrow understatement and earnest awards fodder dominate.
Vandewattyne is an Oldenburg veteran, and a good fit for the festival’s anarchic, genre-friendly agenda. His ear-bashing rock performance took place at the aftershow party to the world premiere of his latest feature, The Belgian Wave, a riotous assault on the senses that turns a rash of real-life UFO sightings into a blood-spurting, mind-bending, acid-punk roller-coaster ride. A classic cult movie, in other words. At the festival’s closing ceremony, it won the “audacity” prize, which is a very Oldenburg concept. Cinema needs more audacity.
On the surface, Oldenburg is a boutique-sized festival with a cosy village atmosphere. It has always been a local platform for emerging German screen talent, but it also has a broader international outlook, with strong work from Turkey, Brazil, Ireland, Jordan, Canada, Japan and others in the program this year, plus various multi-lateral co-productions. Indeed, the festival’s main prize went to German-Kurdish director Ayse Polat’s Im Toten Winkel (In the Blind Spot), a gripping paranoid mystery thriller set in a remote Kurdish region of Turkey.
By coincidence, first-time male film-makers tackling sensitive stories about the kidnap and assault of young women also featured prominently in Oldenburg this year. From the US, low-budget writer-director Truman Kewley’s Beautiful Friend, about an unhinged incel who abducts a young woman to be his soulmate, offered a haunting low-budget riff on this theme. Its female lead, Alexandrea Meyer, won one of the festival’s two main acting awards. Meanwhile Japanese director Takayuki Hayashi’s From Dawn Till Noon On The Sea examines the aftermath of a similar kidnap scenario on a damaged schoolgirl. Hayashi won Oldenburg’s prize for best debut.
French cinema was a strong presence in Oldenburg this year too, with some off-beat gems from Cannes and Annecy festivals screening alongside world premieres and left-field discoveries. An early highlight was French-Moroccan film-maker Mona Achache’s highly personal docu-fiction memoir Little Girl Blue, a meditation on the lives of female artists as viewed through the lens of the director’s mother Carole, who took her own life at 63, with Marion Cotillard playing Carole in flashback scenes. Alongside Michel Gondry’s quirky autobiographical comedy The Book of Solutions and Jérôme Perin’s prize-winning dystopian sci-fi animation Mars Express, Parisian actor-director Isild le Besco was in Oldenburg to present a retrospective of her films, including the premiere of her latest, the powerful lockdown-themed domestic violence drama Confinés.
It may have been awash with micro-budget indie movies shot on basic lo-fi equipment, but Oldenburg’s 30th anniversary edition also looked to the high-tech future of cinema with a sidebar event taking place in the metaverse. In collaboration with the MILC Metaverse, an interactive digital replica of the town centre was created online, with a grand theatre venue hosting trailers and other material from the festival. Users could also visit a virtual art gallery to see an exhibition of works by the late Hans Ohlms, a graphic artist with local connections. Although this technology is clearly still in its infancy, it made sense for Oldenburg to keep breaking new ground like this, pushing against the conventions of traditional film festivals. Rules, after all, are for dogs.
