As the first major European film festival of the calendar year, Rotterdam sometimes has a tough job to generate cinematic heat in chilly late January, falling as it does between the buzzy celebrity glare of Sundance and the big-city brashness of Berlin. But judging by the hustle and swagger witnessed by the TFV team over the last 10 days in this appealingly arty Dutch metropolis, the 54th IFFR continues to deepen and broaden its cosmopolitan appeal, fielding an extremely eclectic program that gives admirably equal wight to rarefied indie drama, wide-ranging world cinema and audience-friendly genre fare.
This year’s edition was notionally the second stage in the “five year plan” announced last year by Rotterdam’s artistic director Vanja Kaludjercic and her new co-director Clare Stewart, which is designed to get the festival back to full speed after its lingering pandemic slump. And it seems to be bearing fruit: a notably high number of screenings and talks were sold out this year, with healthy crowds flocking to even obscure films. A continuation of last year’s policy of cinemas alternating between their regular schedule and festival events is also paying off, promoting IFFR more as a routine entertainment option for the city’s wider film-going public.
This was a banner year for Balkan cinema in Rotterdam, most notably for Croatian director Igor Bezinovic, who won both the Tiger Competition Award and Fipresci Award for Fiume o morte! Featuring a cast of non-professional actors, this punky deconstruction of historical bio-drama conventions recreates the flamboyant ultranationalist Italian poet’s Gabrielle D’Annunzio’s 15-month occupation of Fiume (now Rijeka) in 1919 and 1920. It topped a strong selection of Balkan region features in the IFFR program, including fellow Croatian Ivan Salatic’s brooding period drama Wondrous is the Silence of My Master, a doom-laden portrait of freedom fighters in 19th century Montenegro, and Serbian director Stefan Djordjevic’s deeply personal documentary about loss and grief, Wind, Talk To Me. All three should go on to wider festival runs.
Nordic drama also made a strong showing in Rotterdam this year. The main prize in the Big Screen Competition went to Jon Blåhed’s Raptures, a stark examination of linguistic and religious identity, boosting the prestige of a powerful project that is already a landmark in Scandinavian film history as the first feature film ever shot in Meänkieli, a Finnish dialect recognised as an official minority language in the far north of Sweden. The same section also featured Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo’s Orenda, a moving meditation on love, loss and faith on a remote Baltic island. As an added bonus, Finnish-Swedish actress Alma Pöysti appears in both films.
Picking up one of two Special Jury Awards in Rotterdam was Congolese director Sammy Baloji for L’arbre de l’authenticité (The Tree of Authenticity), the only African entry in the main festival sections. This formally inventive essay-film interrogates the Congo’s colonial and ecological history using multiple time periods and narrators, including the eponymous tree itself. A second Jury Prize went to German director Tim Ellrich’s Im Haus Meiner Eltern (In My Parents’ House), a sombre but beautifully shot monochrome drama about the inequalities and tensions that arise when family members have to care for their sick loved ones.
With its multiple sidebars and non-competing sections, Rotterdam contains multitudes, which means off-beat gems are often to be found tucked away on the festival fringes. In the Harbour section, Giovanni Columbu’s Balentes memorialised a remote tragedy in 1940s Sardinia with an exquisitely crafted piece of high-art animation. The Limelight section included Mikhael Red’s spooky orphanage thriller Lilim, which combined gory folk-horror tropes with oblique commentary on political oppression in the early 1980s Philippines. Meanwhile, a stand-out highlight in the Bright Future section was Red Stars Upon the Field, in which first-time director Laura Laabs digs up the skeletons of German history, making them dance to a wild mixtape of punk rock and Marxist cultural theory.
That said, perhaps the most WTF film that the TFV team caught in Rotterdam was actually in the official Tiger Competition: La gran historia de la filosofía occidental (The Great History of Western Philosophy) by Mexican director Aria Covamonas, a surreal hand-made animated collage which yokes together Chairman Mao, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Mickey Mouse and more for a crazed Dadaist rollercoaster ride, feeling at times like some great lost collaboration between Monty Python and Luis Bunuel. IFFR is a festival where even the wilder fringes of experimental cinema can stake a claim in the main program, which is both commendable and somehow, almost uniquely, very Rotterdam.
