international film festival rotterdam12

Heartof tHetiGer

French filmmakers Lola Bessis and Ruben Amar have come to the 43rd IFFR for the European premiere of their first film, Swim Little Fish Swim. They reveal their inspirations and motivations. By Laya Maheshwari

The inspiration for art often comes from reality. Yet the story behind the creation of Swim Little Fish Swim (screening in Bright Future, today at 11:30 in the Schouwburg Grote Zaal) is particularly peculiar. It is a story about a couple who are polar opposites. The husband is a musician who refuses to compromise his artistic integrity, whereas the more pragmatic wife has to bend over backwards to make ends meet for them and their three-year old daughter. When asked what led them to fashion the couple this way, Amar says: “Once, at a concert, we met a really interest-ing and crazy musician who was actually playing small instruments he had built. Lola and I started to imagine his life.” Lola steps in: “We saw he is unlike any musician and a very interesting guy, but very utopian. We didn’t know anything about him. We saw someone who looked like his wife or his girl-friend and started to imagine, ‘Oh, how would their life together be?’” Two artists making a film with two artists as protagonists must have led to some osmosis. The directors confirm this: “The were exactly how we were. We pictured ourselves in those roles and put a lot of projection into them. We talked a lot about being an artist, so there is some of ourselves in both characters.”Bessis elaborates on the challenges the makers faced making Swim Little Fish Swim with a concept suitable enough to cover many genres: “We had to choose between making something more accessible and commercial to gain visibility and to work with famous actors. At the same time, we wanted to … achieve a fine balance. This was like the child in the movie.”As French artists who had moved to New York, Bessis and Amar present a portrait of the Big Apple rarely seen on screen. Amar explains their intention: “I

think we tried to stay very honest and very close to what we felt as French people in New York. We felt the same when we arrived. We were there for one year before we decided to shoot this movie.” Bessis adds: “We have always been fascinated by New York. We started filming everything with an iPhone, like a diary. At one point, we felt we knew that we were going back to France, but wanted to capture some-thing here and tried to put all that in the movie.” The film has already had its American premiere at SxSW in March 2013, but the filmmakers reserved the European premiere for Rotterdam. “I think Rotterdam’s very prestigious and big on offers. It is known as a festival to discover filmmakers and new types of storytelling, so we are proud of this honour”, they conclude.

Stories are overrated. It would be naive to think that in today’s world what we experience is disconnected from a form of mass culture or, at least, a self-imposed cultural niche. By Irina Trocan

Three films from this year’s IFFR programme – Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy and Tres D, in the Bright Future section, and Silence Radio, in My Own Private Europe – could easily pass as ‘slice of life’ films – were it not for their obvious connection to a medium.Still screening today and tomorrow, Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy by Taiwanese boy wonder Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit is structured around a series of tweets from a (non-famous) teen girl’s Twitter account. It does have what you would conventionally call dramatic structure, centring on the friendship between two teens discovering the pains of love, loss, and perhaps most agonizingly, being co-opted for work by the school principal. The events depicted in the film are extremely random, though – corre-sponding to the randomness of the tweeted pensées – stabbings or cell phone explosions throw us out of the narrative, until we realise they’re just imaginary; but then, it turns out that not all the violent events in the film are.Tres D by Rosendo Ruiz (screening this morning) takes place in a provincial Argentinian festival which allows for reflections on the purpose of making films and the beauty of the real. Mostly fictive, but contain-

ing interviews with real filmmakers and curators, it definitively takes the illusion of glamour and shat-ters the preconceived notion that film-related events primarily centre around films. Somewhere between a Hong Sang-Soo deadpan comedy (though people in Tres D tend to smile more) and Miguel Gomes’s hybrid Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto/Our Beloved Month of August (2008), this is ultimately a very humane film that will leave you rooting for the characters and their film projects.For those of us who grew up with Richard Curtis’s 2009 Pirate Radio (better known as The Boat that Rocked), Valéry Rosier’s Silence Radio (screening tomorrow) triggers the inevitable title association – and a comparison that surprisingly holds true. It should seem crude to compare the rock-crazed kids from the former films to the elderly radio listeners in a small French village in the second, but think about it for a second – it’s still about intense emotions, providing a soundtrack for life events, and creating a sense of community. Employing largely the means of a documentary film, the director’s staging varies from sympathetic (showing the villagers with little manipulative interference and a good dose of tender patience) to slightly (but only slightly) derisive, as in a sequence in which a woman announces on the phone that she will have a busy evening, after which there’s a cut to her at home, absentmindedly eating some soup. It long since stopped being about excitement. Putting life through a filter is all the rage.

43rd International Film Festival Rotterdam #9 Friday 31 January 2014

phot

o: B

ram

Bel

loni

Opposites attract The medium is the message

Happy times at CineMart: Paulo Benzi (left) of Okta Film received the E7,000 ARTE International Prize for the project Happy Time Will Come Soon (directed by Alessandro Comodin) and Adis Djapo of SCCA/pro.ba picked up the E30,000 Eurimages Co-production Development Award for Tabija (directed by Igor Drljaca) at the CineMart awards ceremony on Wednesday night.

UPC aUdienCe award

As of Thursday 14:03 hours

1. Nebraska ...........................................................4.74

2. Starred Up .........................................................4.63

3. After the Tone ...................................................4.61

4. Feel My Love .....................................................4.58

5. Zombie: The Resurrection of Tim Zom ........4.58

and tHe winners are…At tonight’s awards ceremony, the winners will be announced in six of the competitions running at IFFR 2014. In addition to the three winners of the Hivos Tiger Awards Competition, the winners will be announced of the Big Screen Award, the KNF Award, the MovieZone Award, the NETPAC Award and the FIRPESCI Award. 20:00 hrs, de Doelen Arcadis zaal, free admission.

foto

: Nic

hon

Gle

rum

Ruben Amar and Lola Bessis

13international film festival rotterdam

Anatomy of a Paper Clip

first rotterdam, then the world

this year, among the 15 directors competing for the three prestigious awards are austria’s Peter Brunner (mein Blindes Herz / my Blind Heart), Japan’s ikeda akira (anatomy of a Paper Clip / Yamamori clip koujo no atari) and sweden’s ester martin Bergsmark (something must Break / nånting måste gå sönder). By laya maheshwari

my Blind HeartIn My Blind Heart, Peter Brunner documents the tale of Kurt, who suffers from Marfan Syndrome, just like the actor who plays him, Christos Haas. But the film goes way beyond documenting Christos’ incur-able condition. Kurt undertakes a journey in which the boundaries between perpetrator and victim are blurred. This journey leads the film towards one burning question: “How much guilt can one endure?”The filmmaker outlines his approach in this way: “What I love most about filmmaking is entering a character, to look for all the possible layers and to follow the character into his abysses, showing him with all his contradictions. In the case of My Blind Heart, I wanted to work out an episodic drama in which the main character lives recklessly and runs amok in order to free himself. The story came from the character.”Brunner elaborates on the challenges faced by the filmmakers while making a story like this: “Primarily I wanted to work with people who were willing to take a big risk. While searching for them I found disabled people, who offered me moving and touching acting performances without any filter. To me, they are people with quirks and desires and I somehow fell in love with that. I wanted to work with them. Since I do not portray them as people with a disease or disabil-ity, I’m sure the audience will be challenged that way. I did not want to tell the conventional story of a poor disabled guy who experiences a clichéd liberation.”Brunner and his team chose Rotterdam as the plat-form to showcase their work to the world because, as he says, “Rotterdam is a festival that has its own charm and leaves its mark. It offers controversial debut movies like ours an opportunity to be seen on an international scale. We are pretty lucky that there is a platform like this in Europe where the festival programmers take a risk, year after year.” Asked what being in the Hivos Tiger Awards Competition meant to him Brunner answered, “It’s the main competition of one of the most important film festivals in Europe, of course we were happy like little children to be invited with our debut feature!”

anatomy of a Paper ClipAkira’s Anatomy of a Paper Clip on the other hand is a crazy and funny Japanese neo-folk story about Kogure, who is a paperclip bender in a paperclip factory. He is a man without characteristics: a stoical

loser. One day, Kogure finds a butterfly in his flat. This butterfly becomes his wife, but she is even stranger than the bizarre, minimal world he lives in. “Any filmmaker would know about this film festival”, the director says. “It’s known as a place for new talent to be discovered. So I thought it is perfect for my film, which is a little strange. This is only my second feature film.” (translated by Kai Yokojima)

something must BreakSomething Must Break is a love story set in Stockholm in the summer. It depicts the romance between androgy-nous Sebastian (who likes to dress as ‘superwoman’ Ellie) and Andreas, who is not gay. The couple stand together against the smoothed-over, blunted IKEA society. Director Bergsmark took inspiration from his own experiences as a transgender, and required one thing from his debut above all others. This was: “‘It should smell of strong emotions.” “Maybe it wasn’t so much that I chose Rotterdam, but rather Rotterdam chose me”, Bergsmark says. “I think this festival suits my film well because it is a festival with more daring films. I’ve seen some really interesting films that have won a Tiger Award, for example Clip, which won a Tiger in 2012. IFFR is the place to be.”

there’s an undercurrent of painful rootlessness in the tiger awards selection this year. By irina trocan

Whether it’s a film about a fallen child-star of the Communist regime whose life is changed by the forces of history (Viktoria by Maya Vitkova, a Bulgarian-Romanian co-production); an impres-sionistic chronicle of a teenage girl’s displacement to a new home and a new school after a traumatic (and mysterious) incident (Han Gong-Ju by Lee Su-Jin, South Korea); or the tale of a love triangle where the individuals seem to be crushed by pressures coming from society, rather than from their desire or rivalry (Riocorrente by Paulo Sacramento, Brazil) – the long-ings of these characters are more important to the narration than their actions. This doesn’t say much about the mood of the films, however – there’s plenty of space left for invention.

viktoriaViktoria spans three decades and two widely differ-ent regimes. A disconsolate mother who didn’t want to bear a child in Communist Bulgaria is in for an ironic blessing: her daughter Viktoria is born healthy (though without a navel) despite all her mother’s attempts to terminate the pregnancy; what’s more, she comes to life on the very day that marks a decade of Communism, and thus she becomes a national symbol. Simultaneously an unwanted child and a spoiled brat treated like royalty by the authorities, Viktoria’s life becomes even more complicated after

the fall of the Communist regime. From a quirky comedy reminiscent of Czechoslovakian classics, the film (with a runtime of two hours and thirty minutes) shifts in the last part to a family drama spanning three generations of women and highlighting their faults (and the fault lines) in their relationships; suggesting, perhaps unfairly, that all that was needed to console them in these troubled times was a little more consideration from one another.

Han Gong-JuHan Gong-Ju is a highly de-dramatized story of a teen-ager’s post-traumatic shock. Relying on the young actress’ presence to keep us interested in the character (and Chun Woo-Hee does a fine job in the eponymous role), the film methodically shows her gradual adapta-tion to her new environment while boldly suggesting that the other characters’ lives are just as intense and distracting as hers. Even when the nature of the inci-dent is revealed (very late in the film), we’re still left with what we had at the beginning – the character’s unblinking resilience and the often puzzling remote-ness that goes with it.

riocorrenteLike any ambitious art film, Riocorrente is better seen than retold, though many of the dialogue lines are written for strong effect. It’s best to go into the cinema expecting the visualization of torrid emotions and with the mindset of taking these for granted; the actors’ investment is always more captivating than the plot. Thematically, it’s about the need to rebel, and direc-tor Paulo Sacramento places this social anxiety in the context of the recent protest movements: “Of course, the Occupy movements bring us an advanced starting point. The film is connected with them, especially with the ones that happened in Brazil during the last year.

Nevertheless, I think there are very important differ-ences – for instance, the conscience of power – that is only beginning in Brazil. It’s been 20 years since Brazilians previously took to the streets and now there is another generation acting, there is a lot to feel, to talk, to be read and written. I see Riocorrente as a big prologue for something that is going to happen.”

These films also seem to have in common a certain untranslatable, culturally-particular mindset (though the particular culture is different for each film), which should imply that they mean different things to differ-ent audiences. For director Maya Vitkova (Viktoria), her festival tour so far seems to confirm this: “It’s a very different experience here after meeting the talka-tive audience at Sundance – Rotterdam makes it feel more private. As for screening the film in my home country, I have no clear expectations, we’ll wait and see. We, Bulgarians, are generally much more critical to fellow Bulgarians, so I am sure it will be something else again. I am very curious!” For films in the Tiger Competition, it’s Rotterdam first, and then – the world!

the Hivos tiger awards Competition, this year comprising 15 first or second feature films from around the world, is iffr’s showcase competition for new talent. Today we focus on six films in the running for a tiger award you can still catch during the last days of the festival.

Something Must Break

My Blind Heart

Han Gong-Ju

Riocorrente

viktoria