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Test groundDespite tough times, IFFR will continue to provide audiences with a space to be adventurous, says festival boss Rutger Wolfson. By Geoffrey Macnab

Friday morning in the IFFR offices, festival director Rut-ger Wolfson is contemplating the 42nd festival over a cup of tea. Asked to pinpoint his 2013 highlights, Wolf-son apologizes for giving the same answer that he does every year - it’s presenting the work.“You’re an Iranian filmmaker. Your film is from inside your own country. Only a handful of people have seen it in Tehran and you take it to Rotterdam. There’s a sold-out audience in a very beautiful theatre. It’s a re-ally special moment for them, for the audience and for us as well!”In 2012, ticket sales at IFFR fell quite sharply. The to-tal number of audience visits was 274,000, down from 340,000 in 2011. Wolfson and his team have taken some very practical measures to address the slide in what is still one of the biggest public film festivals in the world.Although Wolfson doesn’t yet have precise figures for this year, he is “quite optimistic” that the figures will be steady and perhaps even up. “That’s a big relief because we have been working very hard to make it easier for audience to come to the festival.” IFFR has introduced last-minute tickets, online offers and discount passes. Wolfson and his programmers acknowledge that these are tough times financially but are determined to give festival audiences “the space to be adventurous”.

DistributionMeanwhile, IFFR is further ramping up its distribution activities through its new partnership with Under The Milky Way (which has set up an IFFR room on iTunes for Benelux viewers). “It’s a very logical step. We support filmmakers at every stage but distribution is clearly one of the most difficult things”, Wolfson reflects.

Alongside this, the Festival will continue to work with its other regular partners. “The wisdom nowadays is that you should go for all platforms. No-one is talking about exclusivity. For us, it is a test ground to see what works.”This year, the festival has introduced the Big Screen Award to support distribution of films in Dutch cin-emas. However, the festival boss laments the fact that EYE, the Dutch centre for film culture and heritage, is no longer allowed to pick up films for distribution in the Netherlands. “The Big Screen Award can’t fill that gap, but I am happy at least we can do something.”

Hubert Bals FundWolfson acknowledges that there are questions about long-term finance for the Hubert Bals Fund, whose government funding will dry up after next year’s edi-tion. However, the IFFR boss gives a 100% commitment that HBF (which supports filmmakers from developing countries) will remain a core part of IFFR’s identity.“It is clear for us that the combination of festival, mar-ket and Fund will work really well,” Wolfson suggests. “They [filmmakers supported by HBF] make the fes-tival stronger, which in turn allows the festival to be a better partner for filmmakers.” Wolfson says that IFFR “still hasn’t found the magical solution that makes all the financial problems with the Hubert Bals Fund go away.” Nonetheless, he is confident that HBF will continue.

Celebrity visitsLast weekend, Dutch culture minister Jet Bussemak-er came to town. During her trip, IFFR was effectively acting as matchmaker, bringing her together with key Dutch industry figures in advance of the government ‘summit’ on the Dutch film industry in March. “There’s a broad consensus in the Dutch industry about what needs to be done”, Wolfson suggests of plans to set up some form of tax incentive or shelter to stimulate film-

making in the Netherlands – and to stop the country losing so much work to neighbouring Belgium.He is delighted by the press attention for Bernardo Ber-tolucci. “But we’re not the kind of festival that gives life-time achievement awards to someone who hasn’t made a film in five years just to get all this press. He has made a very nice new film that we like very much.”

Art:Film This year has seen the launch of Rotterdam’s new Art:-Film initiative in collaboration with Danish documen-tary festival CPH:DOX.Wolfson says the initiative will continue. “What the festival can offer is access to the film industry … if art-ists want to make a feature film project, please come to Cine Mart. But if you want to make an installation to sell to collectors, that’s not our forte”, Wolfson says. For Art:Film is to work, Wolfson argues, it needs to be “practical, practical, practical, practical,” not another talking shop. “In the end, it’s an industry. You need to show results. These projects need to be financed and to be distributed. They need to build a track record. That’s what it is all about.”

We’ll meet againThe festival boss hasn’t had time to think about who will replace CineMart coordinator Jacobine van der Vloed, who is leaving the festival after a decade’s sterling ser-vice. “We’re very sorry to see Jacobine go. She has been a very hard driving force”, Wolfson says. “We have a very good team. I am sure we can figure out how to do it.”In April, Wolfson will be heading to the Caribbean for the second Curaçao IFFR. The first edition went well and Wolfson believes the sister event will continue to grow.The festival director’s own contract runs until 2014. It’s not the time, though, to ask if he will continue. “We’ll see”, Wolfson states. In the meantime, it’s time “to get reacquainted with my kids!”

(Nearly) all the Tiger nominees 2013. Back row: Eduardo Villanueva (Penumbra); Pelin Esmer (Watchtower); Guido van Driel (The Resurrection of a Bastard); Yang Lina (Longing for the Rain); Marcelo Lordello (They’ll Come Back). Middle row: Giovanni Columbu (Su Re); Daniel Hoesl (Soldier Jane); Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit (36);Matt Hulse (Dummy Jim).

Front row: Mohammad Shirvani (Fat Shaker); Leonardo Brzezicki (Noche); Mira Fornay (My Dog Killer); Sebastián Hofmann (Halley); Visra Vichit Vadakan (Karaoke Girl); Eliza Hittman (It Felt Like Love). Not present: Ricky Rijneke (Silent Ones). photo: Bram Belloni

daily tiger42nd international Film Festival rotterdam #10 Saturday 2 February 2013

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Kiva Reardon, Jutta Sarhimaa, Agustín Acevedo Kanopa (Young Film Critics); Boris Nelepo, Ronald Rovers, Nam Da-Eum, Robert Koehler (FIPRESCI); Carlos Carvajal, Polly Kamukama (Young Film Critics), Diego Lerer (FIPRESCI) photo: Nichon Glerum

Cub reporters

Five journalists from around the world have been at Rotterdam to take part in the Young Film Critics pro-gramme, participating in talent development, explor-ing the festival and blogging about films they’ve seen. They also collectively served as a single member on the jury of the FIPRESCI award.IFFR 2013 was Carlos Carvajal’s first film festival outside his native Spain. For him, the most striking element of Rotterdam is the concentration of people working across different aspects of contemporary film culture. “That mix of industry, journalists and film-makers lets you see how films actually get made”, he says. “In Uruguay, a festival is usually in one venue”, adds Agustín Acevedo Kanopa, from Montevideo. “Here, it’s like the festival is the whole city – I’m not sure who

the local people are. There are so many guests it be-comes like a micro-community.”Uganda’s Polly Kamukama, who has only attended festivals in East Africa before now, also enlarged his understanding of what a film festival can be. “There, festivals are about screenings and that’s it. Here, there are so many programmes, retrospectives, critics, professionals and filmmakers. I hope I can carry this knowledge back to Uganda and add some value [to the country’s rapidly changing film culture].”The scheme can help boost personal confidence and professional development. “When you’re starting out, it’s natural to be insecure about your writing or your views or the fact you haven’t seen every film under the sun”, says Canadian Kiva Reardon. Being part of the programme “gives you more confidence to talk to ar-

tistic directors of festivals and filmmakers and other critics too.”Reardon was able to use her presence at Rotterdam to pitch to editors at home. Both she and Jutta Sarhimaa, from Finland, have been able to place interviews with newspapers they haven’t previously written for. “In Finland, there aren’t many places where you can just write reviews,” says Sarhimaa. “I’m beginning to give more emphasis to actually meeting the creators be-cause it’s easier to get stories published if you’ve got interviews with directors.”As well as finding it informative and useful, the young critics emphasise how much they’ve enjoyed their IFFR experience. “It was fun!” Acevedo Kanopa says. “Some-times you tend to put that aside but it’s really impor-tant to have fun at festivals.” BW

Park Chan-Wook, maker of IFFR closer Stoker, talks about the experience of working in Hollywood. By Sietse Meijer

Acclaimed South Korean director Park Chan-Wook talked to the Daily Tiger yesterday ahead of presenting his new film Stoker, a psychological drama with Mia Wasikowski and Nicole Kidman. It’s the first US studio film for the director, but Park claims there was no pressure for him to tone down his trademark abrasive style (the inventively violent Oldboy, for instance, features a particularly gruelling sequence in which he required his actor to eat a live octopus). “Fox Searchlight [the company behind Stoker] liked edgy, strong films,” he tells says, “and that’s why they were working with me.”Park is generally positive about his Hollywood experience, but admits he found the notes he received from studio ex-ecutives disconcerting. “Korean studios don’t really give you specific notes the way they do in the US. I listened to them as carefully as I could. They realised that when I said ‘no’ I was thinking about what they said. They respected that – and at times the notes were helpful.”Discussing future projects, Park is open to returning to the US, and talks of his plans to make The Brigands of Rattleborge. S. Craig Zahler’s script is much admired by Hollywood insiders but the projects has been stalled in development for some years because of its challenging content. Park agrees the project is ultraviolent, but says “it’s not as if there haven’t been films like this before. It’s not so violent that the producer is worried about it”.Park is keeping a polite distance from the US remake of Oldboy, which Spike Lee is set to direct. “The producer’s a friend of mine,” he says, “he showed me the script, it’s interesting”. Would he be interested in directing? “No,” says Park, “it would be boring for me.”Instead, Park will return to Korea for his latest feature, Agashi, a drama about a Korean girl who works in the house of a Japanese aristocrat during Japan’s occupation of Korea in the early twentieth century. “This will be the final part of my girl’s coming of age trilogy, after I’m A Cyborg but that’s OK and Stoker.”

Ziba offers a glimpse of Iran on the verge of a nervous breakdown. By Edward Lawrenson

Receiving its European premiere in IFFR’s Bright Future, Bani Khoshnoudi’s Ziba is an absorbing and provoking portrait of an affluent 38-year-old woman called Ziba, who becomes stranded in a new housing development on the outskirts of Tehran. Played with telling restraint by Neda Razavipour (an artist who is also presenting an installation work at IFFR), Ziba meets a middle-aged man and his teenage daughter. Through their encounters, the film emerges as a study of characters who are adrift, disaffected, entrapped and alienated. Ziba explores moods and emotions that have especial resonance in Iran, Khoshnoudi tells the Daily Tiger. “The whole film is a kind of metaphor for the state of the country: it is a country in depression, not just on an economic level but ethically and culturally – it’s a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”Khoshnoudi – who was raised outside of Iran but has worked and lived there for prolonged periods since she was in her early twenties – wrote the screenplay before ‘green movement’ protests that broke out in Iran over the 2009 presidential election. Her film explores the sense of frustration that was building at the time, what she calls the film’s “pressure-cooking feeling”.Filmed with precise elegance, architecture plays a prominent role in Ziba. Most striking of all is the film’s

main location, a near-empty new apartment block. “I made a documentary in an area similar to the one we see in the film on the outskirts of Tehran. This was in 2007 and when I went back for the film in 2011, I couldn’t find the neighbourhood because it had been completely over-developed. It’s a concern the film ad-dresses: how quickly we’re expanding the city, but how little we’re thinking about the implications.”Khoshnoudi’s approach combines improvisation from her cast of non-professionals with a rigorous and controlled visual scheme. It’s a way of working, she admits, that was “a little disconcerting” for her es-tablished crew. “The hardest part for me was not gov-ernment restrictions,” she says of shooting in Tehran, “but working within a traditional Iranian film crew – it had to do with me coming from abroad, not having grown up there, with me being a woman, and way the violence that comes from the state is reproduced in our own groups – a lot of the things I’m talking about in the film itself”.Based in Mexico City, Khoshnoudi is about to start writing a screenplay set in Mexico: “There’s in a Ira-nian character in it, and the project has to do with displacement and migration, important issues in Iran right now.”

Bright FutureZiba – Bani Khoshnoudi Sat 02 Feb 16:30 CI6

And the winners are…This year’s Hivos Tiger Awards go to films from Slovakia, Austria and Iran. The inaugural Big Screen Award goes to an Italian “celebration of life”.

The three winners of the equal Hivos Tiger Awards 2013 are:My Dog Killer (Môj pes Killer) by Mira Fornay (Slovakia/Czech Republic, 2013). An unflinching study of a troubled teen in small-town Slovakia, the film was praised by its jury for “showing a very strong subject from the inside”. Soldier Jane (Soldate Jeannette) by Daniel Hoesl (Austria, 2012). A provocative portrait of two women from different ends of the social spec-trum, Hoesl’s debut feature was commended for it “strong imagery and visual power.” Fat Shaker (Larzanandeye charbi) by Mohammad Shirvani (Iran, 2013)Shirvani’s drama about a stern patriarch was, the jury stated, “a fascinating story with superb characters.”

The jury of the 2013 Hivos Tiger Awards Compe-tition (prize €15,000) consisted of distinguished Iranian actress Fatemeh Motamedarya; Russian scriptwriter and filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa; Dutch filmmaker Kees Hin; José Luis Cienfuegos, artistic director of the Seville European Film Fes-tival (Spain) and Chinese visual artist and film-maker Ai Weiwei (who was not be able to attend the festival and commented on his jury duty in a prerecorded video message). They made their announcement of the winners at the Awards Ceremony last night in de Doelen.

As well as revealing the winners of the Hivos Ti-ger Awards Competition, IFFR named Pretty But-terflies (Bellas mariposas) by Salvatore Mereu (Ita-ly, 2012) as winner of its new Big Screen Award Competition. The film follows a day in the life of a young Sardinian girl.

The winners of the NETPAC, FIPRESCI and KNF awards were also announced. Two of the winners were supported by the Hubert Bals Fund, and one was a CineMart project.

Introduced this year, the Big Screen Award Com-petition is open to ten selected films and aims to support the distribution of films in Dutch cine-mas through a guaranteed distribution offer for the Benelux, in collaboration with Dutch distrib-utor Amstelfilm.

The Dutch Circle of Film Critics (KNF) Jury award – chosen from the ten films in The Big Screen Award Competition – went to The Future (Il futuro) by Alicia Scherson (Chile/Germany/Italy/Spain, 2013), The Award includes a guaran-teed distribution offer for the Benelux in collabo-ration with Dutch distributor Amstelfilm and a subtitled DCP sponsored by digital film lab NCP Holland.

The winner of the Rotterdam FIPRESCI Award 2013 (see photo on this page for selected jury members) is:The Fifth Gospel of Kaspar Hauser (O quinto evanx-eo de Gaspar Hauser) by Alberto Gracia (Spain, 2013).

The NETPAC Jury (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) awards the best Asian film in IFFR 2013 official selection. The winner of the NETPAC Award 2013 is:What They Don’t Talk About When They Talk About Love (Yang tidak dibicarakan ketika membicarakan cinta) by Mouly Surya (Indonesia, 2013).

The UPC Audience Award and the Dioraphte Award will be presented this evening.

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A new documentary looks back at the 1940 bombing of Rotterdam. By Geoffrey Macnab

There have been two films this year remembering the bombing of Rotterdam in 1940.One, Ate De Jong’s dramatized version Bombardment starring singer Jan Smit and produced by San Fu Mal-tha, was a Titanic-style epic that received very mixed notices from critics. On an altogether more intimate scale is Heddy Honigmann’s documentary Memories of Fire (Herinneringen aan vuur), screening in IFFR’s Spec-trum Shorts. The details of the Rotterdam blitz are familiar enough. On May 14th 1940, the German air force targeted the city, which became “a sea of fire.” The Dutch resist-ance was in the process of surrendering but the bomb-ing went on regardless.Veteran director Honigmann’s doc intersperses ar-chive footage with interviews with old-timers talking

about the bombing.The interviewees, mostly now in their 80s, were kids when they were caught up in the destruction of their home city. That’s what makes their reminiscences so poignant. In their accounts of the events of May 14th, they talk about the parents whose hands they held but who were powerless to protect them. They saw homes and possessions destroyed. This was the moment that their childhood innocence was lost too. An old man, barely a teenager in 1940, says that he realized after the bombing that he needed to be independent.“The memories that surfaced were emotional”, one of two brothers tells the filmmaker at the end of the documentary. He is speaking with understatement. However, in talking to Honigmann, he has clearly sum-moned up memories not just of the destruction of Rot-terdam but of the loss of his own youth.The brothers’ parents had finally managed to set up a successful business only a few weeks before the bomb-

ing but they lost everything. By the time the bombing was finally over, the boys didn’t own so much as “a change of socks.”Many of the interviewees still have a very primal fear of fire. One talks of the flexible ladder he packs when-ever he stays in a hotel. Another describes the stomach upsets he feels at even the smell of smoke.Honigmann isn’t interested in military history or poli-tics. Instead, she concentrates on the very personal sto-ries of her subjects. We see them walking down Rotter-dam streets that have long since been rebuilt, trying to remember precisely how they once looked.These are survivors. They built new lives, married, had children and grandchildren. One talks about his “58-year honeymoon” with his childhood sweetheart whom he married (but who is recently deceased.) A couple interviewed in a busy street speak of their en-during love for one another.(The wife, though, can’t hide her exasperation at how untidy her husband is

while he complains that whenever she tidies his desk, he loses everything.)Their affectionate banter only adds to the pathos as we also hear what they endured in the bombing and learn how many of their relatives died in the Holocaust.Honigmann was originally hesitant when producers Lagestee Film approached her to make the doc (which was watched by a huge audience when broadcast on TV earlier this year). She is at pains to point out that this isn’t a history lesson. Nor is it “a document for the city of Rotterdam” as some have suggested. It is, instead, a very personal and very intimate film on themes she has explored many times before in her work, namely memory, yearning and bereavement.

Spectrum Shorts Memories of Fire / Herinneringen aan vuur – Heddy HonigmannSat 02 Feb 15:00 CI5

Vampires, female boxing and crucifixions feature in Khavn De La Cruz’s new film. By Ben Walters

Khavn De La Cruz is a busy man, but the Filipino polymath and Rotterdam regular – 34 IFFR credits and counting – found a brief window in his non-stop schedule of screenings and meetings to talk about the two new films he’s brought to this year’s festival. He left several others at home, of course.Both were opportunistic enterprises spurred by so-cial encounters. Misericordia: The Last Mystery of Kristo Vampiro, which had its world premiere in Spec-trum, combines travelogue footage, vampire voice-over and copious use of red filters. It grew out of a trip the director took with an Italian friend who was visiting the Philippines; the itinerary included peni-tents’ crucifixions outside Manila, a bar staffed by little people, female boxing, a giant cemetery and sev-eral cockfights. “It wasn’t planned at all”, Khavn says. “When we shot, it was just documenting interesting locations. Then I fantasised about a vampire-Christ character to narrate it.” In its subject, the film has connections with earlier Khavn films such as 2009’s Middle Mystery of Kristo Negro; in its form, it echoes 2010’s Cameroon Love Letter (For Solo Piano), which favoured blue rather than red.It was paired with the short How to Raise a Smart &

Happy Child from Age Zero to Five, an initially playful collection of sequences of Filipino children at play that turns out to be a vehicle for deeply troubling information about the vulnerability of many of the country’s kids. “My father has a close friend whose wife is a hard-core social worker”, Khavn says. “About five years ago, she told me a story about these kids she came across who she thought were playing in a drum. It turned out they were having sex. On the one hand, I was really disturbed; on the other hand, I really want-ed to make it into a film. She co-wrote the short film – we added these two other stories to engage with a range of related subjects.”Naturally, Khavn has a number of projects in the works. He’s making progress on his long-gestating sa-tirical science-fiction rock opera EDSA XXX: Nothing Ever Changes in the Republic of Ever Change; then he’s shooting the Hubert Bals Fund-backed Desaparad-iso, set in the 70s during the Philippines’ period of martial law and involving a magic bird; then there’s The Ruined Work, a “street noir” shot by Christopher Doyle. And ‘Shock Box’, a book of poetry. “And I might do some albums. It’s momentum. Maybe if I stop I’ll really stop...”

SpectrumMisericordia: The Last Mystery of Kristo Vampiro – Khavn De La Cruz

An immigration centre near Schiphol airport is the setting of Jaap van Heusden’s second feature The New World. By Nick Cunningham

“From a director’s point of view, a lot of drama is con-densed both in time and space, so everything becomes a high-pressure cooker”, opines Jaap van Heusden of his world premiere in the Bright Future strand The New World (De nieuwe wereld). In the film, a widower asylum seeker, Luc (played by Issaka Sawadogo) must wait eight days within Schiphol airport’s unprepossessing immi-gration centre as his case is considered. During this pe-riod, a touching relationship develops between him and Mirte (played by Bianca Krijgsman), an irascible cleaner (and herself a widow), who loans out her phone to in-mates in exchange for items of jewelry, and is unofficial-ly paid by inspectors for her unerring ability to flush out fraudulent claimants. The immigration centre is little more than functional, and sparse accommodation is provided for the immigrants, so the secret relationship between Luc and Mirte must develop, in the main, within public areas. Against this background, Van Heusden deployed the techniques used by his “master” Mike Leigh to elicit the best performances from his actors. “What I did was to rehearse both protag-

onists separately so they did not meet”, he confirms. “Is-saka came straight from Burkina Faso and brought a lot of stories with him that we rehearsed separately, and the first moment we found out how he would react with Bian-ca was during the first moments of the first scene.” The chemistry that subsequently develops between the pair is rare both in its authenticity and its poignancy.The character of Luc is invested with such life and vig-our because these were the types that director Van Heu-sden encountered when he lived in West Africa around the turn of the millennium. “The people I knew were so full of hope and courage and daring; not the pitiful people that you see in the newspapers or on the news coverage of asylum centres.” The sinister immigration centre, “created in this effi-cient Dutch way”, was a complete mystery to him before he researched the project, the director says. “It is not to say that they violate all sorts of UN laws, but when you are there, when you are part of it, it is very, very strange. Nobody I know knew about this centre. And I thought that is also strange. It is good for people to know that the Dutch have created such a place.”

Bright FutureThe New World / De nieuwe wereld – Jaap van HeusdenSat 02 Feb 09:30 Oude Luxor

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NL: Anton Damen (hoofdredactie), Kim van der Meulen (eindredactie), Joost Broeren, Paul van de Graaf, Sietse Meijer, Maricke Nieuwdorp, Nicole Santé, Veerle Snijders (redactie), Loes Evers, Rik Mertens, Pete Wu (web), Sanne de Rooij (marketing en communicatie), Marieke Berkhout (traffic)UK: Edward Lawrenson (editor-in-chief ), Nick Cunningham, Geoffrey MacNab, Mark Baker (editors), Ben Walters (web)Met medewerking van:Harriëtte UbelsProgrammainformatie: Chris Schouten, Melissa van der SchoorCoördinatie A-Z: Saskia Gravelijn (tekst), Amanda Harput (beeld)Fotografie: Felix Kalkman, Bram Belloni, Corinne de Korver, Marije van Woerden, Ruud Jonkers, Nichon Glerum, Nadine MaasVormgeving: Sjoukje van Gool, Laurenz van Galen, Gerald ZevenboomDrukker: Veenman+Acquisitie: Daily ProductionsOplage: 10.000 per dag, Volkskrantdag 12.000

INTERNATIONAL fILm fEsTIvAL ROTTERdAm 7

Dutch director Nanouk Leopold discusses future projects with Nick Cunningham

Nanouk Leopold is in a minor quandary. Not that she’s overly concerned about it. She has earned her mon-ey from It’s All So Quiet, an adaptation of Gerbrand Bakker’s novel about the relationship between a farmer and his ailing father and which will open Berlinale Pan-orama next week, and now she can sit down and write to her heart’s content. Or until the money runs out, as she says. Nevertheless, she is in a quandary. About genre. About audience satisfaction. And about the business of sticking to artistic principles.She doesn’t consider herself to be a genre director, but right now she wouldn’t mind giving it a go. She explains why. “I read somewhere that if you know what will hap-pen [in life], then you are a much happier person. So if you know what will happen in the film, then you are a much happier viewer. Which is why genre films work so fine. If it is a Western, you know he is not going to turn out to be a horrible psycho killer person. You know the rules in advance.”So, if she is going to embrace genre, then on what terms? So far, her films have been pure art house fare – psychological portraits painted with a vagabond curi-osity and a tempered severity, but her experience on It’s All So Quiet turned her reluctant head. “I made a film that is, in essence, not so different from the other films I have made, but a few things are different and this makes it much more approachable for many people. It’s sort of more soft and warm and inviting. It helps people think about the same issues I would normally talk about, but before, that was in a very harsh way. This time, I gave away a goody bag to the audience at the end.”Leopold recalls a conversation she had with the sales agent of her Brownian Movement, which preceded It’s All So Quiet, when she spoke of her resistance to putting whipped cream on top to satisfy audience taste. “But they are eating cactus now”, was his reply.“I think my producer would like it if I were to go fur-ther on this path,” she continues; “to try more and break open and – I don’t know how to say it, it sounds so horrible – in order to reach more people. I think it sounds fishy and dirty. This is like ‘cursing in the church’, as we say in Dutch. I would never have said this five years ago. It feels like giving up. Like aban-

doning the great cause of Communism, when you see how a little capitalism kind of works, that it keeps the people happy. It’s terrible!”That said, she is prepared to accept the comforts that the rules of genre bestow. “If you take the structure of, for example, the thriller, then within that you have lots of freedom as long as you follow the recipes. Normally I didn’t want to follow recipes but … it’s my fifth film and only now I see how much it works if you follow convention. For just 10% [adherence to the rules of

genre] people are desperately thankful, and that’s not bad, that’s good. There is still 90% freedom left, as op-posed to 100% when creating something they feel at a loss watching. It’s enough to satisfy the demands of a spectator who then knows what he or she is looking at.”Which filmmaker does she hope to emulate in her fu-ture projects? “I want to change – and I really like it. I want to find out what else I can do. I really like the films of David Lean, like Ryan’s Daughter. The way he tells the story. My Brownian Movement was a sort of Passage to

India – I thought of that film a lot. I’m revisiting old friends from the past – Ken Russell, he is a great man. Nic Roeg. All these old guys. Michael Powell. I have to reposition myself and see what I want to make, and re-read the books that inspired me and then I want to make something that is more in the structure of a normal film. I desperately want to make a film next year. Then I will lay low in the industry, build a bigger audience and then in 10 years I will make my terrible cactus again.”

Nanouk Leopold photo: Corinne de Korver

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ma

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Fate

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119’

15:00

Mat

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86’

17:45

Was

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wan

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106’

20:00

Fran

kens

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Rich

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22:30

Lore

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11:00

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107’

13:30

Ava

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16:00

Shi

p of

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seus

Ana

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andh

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18:30

The

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tone

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98’

10:15

Path

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13:15

Me

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16:15

De

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19:15

Spr

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arm

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22:15

Dum

my

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09:30

Path

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C

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titio

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hort

Film

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78’

12:30

Tige

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75’

15:30

Noc

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85’

18:15

Sig

htse

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21:00

Alo

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09:45

Path

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The

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12:00

Pie

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15:15

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19:00

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70’

22:00

Il fu

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cher

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94’

10:00

Path

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Mat

terh

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Die

derik

Ebb

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87’

13:00

Mel

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15:30

It F

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18:45

Last

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21:30

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09:45

Path

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arce

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12:45

Mod

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15:45

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18:45

Par

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lrich

Sei

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21:45

On

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09:15

Path

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12:15

Pen

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89’

15:15

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89’

18:15

Eter

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114’

21:15

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09:30

Path

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Che

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15:30

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18:30

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21:30

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09:15

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11:45

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14:15

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17:00

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69’

19:45

Nor

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22:15

Jise

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12:00

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17:15

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20:00

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22:30

Cin

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13:45

Goi

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15:30

Goi

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Torr

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87’

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Sha

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21:45

Pas

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