The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) is set to kick off for its first full-scale, physical edition since Covid changed the world, after lockdowns forced it online for two years running. Guests will be welcomed back to De Doelen festival hub and other venues across the city, hoping for a return to an approximation of pre-pandemic normality.
The festival will open on January 25 with the world premiere of Norwegian production Munch. Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken’s portrait of the nineteenth-century Expressionist painter Edvard Munch spans four phases of his adult life in the bohemian enclaves of Europe, as he sought a way to capture modern anguish on canvas that resulted in his most famous work The Scream.
Rotterdam’s 52nd edition will be the first in-person event for festival director Vanja Kaludjercic, who navigated the daunting logistical challenge of last-minute online turnaround in both of her first two years at the helm. Along with managing director Marjan van der Haar and their team, she faces heightened scrutiny over how the programme will land, following last year’s controversial restructure. Some permanent positions were cut and long-standing freelancers were not asked back, in a slimming down of operations that the festival attributed to financial considerations.
The announcement of a full programme that seems broadly in keeping with the daring and diverse spirit of prior editions has, for the time being, quelled concerns in some industry corners over how pressures to focus on profit may impact the identity of IFFR, which has an established reputation for radical, adventurous programming and the nurturing of new voices.
The festival’s flagship Tiger Competition, showcasing emerging talent, will present sixteen features. A jury made up of Lav Diaz, Sabrina Baracetti, Alonso Díaz de la Vega, Anisia Uzeyman and Christine Vachon will select a winner for the Tiger Award, worth €40,000, and two Special Jury Awards, with €10,000 of prize money each. Highly anticipated titles in the line-up include the Ukrainian production La Palisiada by Philip Sotnychenko, about a murder investigated in the ‘90s just before the abolition of the death penalty, and Georden West’s Playland, in which the history of a legendary, now-demolished Boston gay bar is revived by returned ghosts.
The Big Screen Competition, which has an audience award of €30,000 attached, and a guaranteed theatrical release in the Netherlands for the winner, includes Martin Skovbjerg’s Danish thriller Copenhagen Does Not Exist, with Zlatko Buric (Best Actor at last year’s European Film Awards) in the cast, and the Portuguese production Nao Sou Nada — The Nothingness Club, Edgar Pera’s surrealistic take on the world of writer Fernando Pessoa.
The festival’s well-respected Ammodo Tiger Shorts competition this year includes films by Morgan Alaric Quaintance and Cho Seoungho in its 24-film-strong line-up.
Varun Grover’s All India Rank will close the festival, capping an edition with a strong Indian presence. A focus programme entitled ‘The Shape of Things to Come?’ will draw attention to the rise of far-right Hindu nationalism in India, as it has emerged in the political landscape of the last three decades, going back to the political satire of Sanjiv Shah’s 1992 musical Love in the Time of Malaria.
British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen will finally be able to present his much-anticipated Sunshine State, a two-channel video installation commissioned by IFFR in collaboration with venue Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen; the project had to be postponed due to the pandemic. It shows in the Art Directions programme, where six installations will be on view. Among them are multidisciplinary Chinese artist Shuang Li’s Æther (Poor Objects) at Rotterdam’s Central Station, and a series of audio-visual performances at the music/new media space WORM.
A symposium on the future of film festivals will take place on 29 January. Closed and invite-only, the event will create a space for industry professionals, in the form of a steering group including Toronto senior programmer Giovanna Fulvi and UK producer Mike Goodridge, to discuss how to strategically work together for a sustainable future in a pressured post-pandemic climate. Their conclusions will be presented the next day in a session open to press and industry.
With this edition, IFFR appears eager to reposition itself in the public narrative as part of the solution, rather than another symptom of a disrupted, economically squeezed festival landscape. It runs from 25 January to 5 February.
