INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

44th International Film Festival Rotterdam #2 Friday 23 January 2015 ENGLISH EDITION

IFFR’s As Long As It Takes: Short & Mid-Length selection is regarded by some as a festival within the festival. Melanie Goodfellow reports

There is often a tendency to regard short fi lms as a rite of passage for budding fi lmmakers whose real aim in life is to make feature-length fi lms. This is not the case at IFFR. Here, the short is regarded as a format in its own right.“We focus on short works by visual artists rather than traditional narrative fi lms,” says Peter van Hoof, who oversees selection. “There are more and more artists working with video who are interested in showing their work in the context of a fi lm festival, rather than a gallery. Making installations in galleries and museums is nice, but showing their work at a fi lm festival gives them more of an opportunity to connect with the audience,” he continues. “Working within these two worlds without the boundaries in between is very important for them.”

Tiger shortsThe 20 works competing in the Tiger Award Competition for Short Films this year include British artist and fi lmmaker Ben Rivers’ Things, a study of his most treasured objects divided up according to the seasons, created as part of the UK’s year-long Where You Are initiative in which artists associated with travel paused to refl ect on something close and local. Other contenders include Safi a Benhaim’s La Fièvre, Terence Nance’s An Oversimplication of Her Beauty and Basim Magdy’s Many Colors of the Sky Radiate Forgetfulness. Benhaim’s La Fièvre draws inspiration from her

background as the Paris-raised daughter of Moroccan political exiles and revolves around what it means to return to the country, in the wake of the Arab Spring which has shaken up the region, if not touched Morocco directly.American fi lmmaker Nance’s An Oversimplication of Her Beauty, which premiered in Sundance’s New Frontier section, is inspired by his obsession with a young woman, Namik Winter, who plays herself on screen. Egyptian artist and fi lmmaker Magdy’s Many Colors of the Sky Radiate Forgetfulness is an abstract refl ection on war and how it reverberates through the ages, revolving around shots of lichen-covered sculptures and a decorative fountain in a municipal park.This year’s jury comprises British artist Beatrice Gibson, who has won the Tiger Award for Short Film twice, with A Necessary Music and A Tiger’s Mind; Dutch art historian and curator Xander Karkens and Japanese Koyo Yamashita, artistic director of the infl uential Image Forum Festival. Three winners will each receive a cash prize of €3,000 and a small camera.

Front-loadedThe competition screenings are already in full swing at the festival’s short fi lm hub, the LantarenVenster art-house multiplex on the south bank of the river Maas, but the contenders represent just a fraction of the short fi lms playing at the festival. “Overall we show some 200 shorts across the programme. It’s actually a festival within the festival,” laughs Van Hoof, who notes that he and his selection team screened more than 3,500 productions ahead of this year’s

edition. “We load the short selection into the fi rst fi ve days of the festival so that everyone can be here at the same time and watch one another’s shorts,” he adds.Other highlights on Friday (Jan 23) include The Universe of Jaap Pieters, a portrait of the Dutch Super-8 fi lmmaker and photographer, who is the subject of a special programme this year. A Q&A with the idiosyncratic. A Q&A with the idiosyncratic artist and fi lmmaker Barbara den Uyl will follow the screening of the documentary. The programme will also premiere fi ve new super-8 works by Pieters.

Special programmesOther special programmes are devoted to Tiger contender Magdy as well as Romanian artist Irina Botea, best known for her playful re-enactment projects, reimagining historical events to cast a different light on past and present realities. Egyptian-born, Switzerland-based Magdy’s multimedia work has shown in galleries and museums across the world including Tate Modern in London and Palais de Tokyo in Paris. “He’s an interesting artist working with all types of formats with very different perspectives. He moves between cinema and the art world. He works with found footage as well as material he has shot himself in Egypt. He started out doing slide projections and ended up doing video works. We bookend the programme with his slide works,” says Van Hoof. The festival will screen fi ve of his videos as well as two slide projects. Magdy will participate in a Q&A as well as an expert panel on short narrative and experimental fi lms at the industry club alongside Nance, Artforum journalist Erika Balsom, Visions du Réel curator Emilie Bujes and Dutch critic Jan Pieter Ekker.

Free SentsovWhat the F?!Critics’ Choice

3 Video libraryEveryday PropagandaIFFR Late NightLa vie de Jean-Marie

4 Banana Pancakes and the Children of Sticky Rice Impressions of a Drowned Man

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The IFFR Short Film Selection Committee and Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films Jury: Fay Breeman, Xander Karskens (jury), Erwin van ‘t Hart, Maaike Gouwenberg, Peter van Hoof, Peter Taylor, Joke Ballintijn, Beatrice Gibson (jury), Koyo Yamashita (jury), Thomas Zwakhals and Julian Ross. Photo: Ruud Jonkers

Never Mind the Length…

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INDUSTRY DRINKSTonight, join your industry colleagues for Friday night drinks at the Industry Club: enjoy a beer or a wine with the Film Offi ce, CIneMart, HBF & IFFR programmers. Open to accredit-ed fi lm professionals, 17:30 to 19:30 in the Industry Club on the 4th fl oor of de Doelen.

MIND THE GAPTonight is the second Mind the Gap night in WORM: live perfor-mances from Dutch trio Telcosystems, visual artist Sally Golding, German audio artist and video artist Markus Mehr & Stefanie Six.

TIGER ALERTPrepare for your trip to IFFR with the Tiger Alert Pro newsletter with all the latest industry news. Sign up at www.iffr.com/professionals.

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3INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

Well, programmer Bianca Taal does for a start. And so will legions of feminists (both male and female), cineastes, politcos and activists. As will your standard, curious and smart festival attendee. Taal’s IFFR programme Signals: What the F?! (WTF) looks to examine twenty-first century feminism in all its guises, as well as assess its complexities and contradictions. Taal’s Signals section is not a polemic, she is keen to emphasise. “It’s not necessarily films that have been made from a feminist standpoint, but ones which take a different angle, or look at what feminism is or could be, in a different way,” she stresses. “For example, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night [director: Ana Lily Amirpour], I mean you don’t have to look at that film as a feminist film, but then again it is about a vampire girl on a skateboard in a hijab having fun with her teeth, attacking evil men. So you can call that feminism.”The WTF programme comprises nine films in total which include world premieres of the Mexican Me quedo contigo (I Stay with You) by Artemio Narro, No Men Beyond this Point (Mark Sawers, Canada), Ana Lungu’s Self-portrait of a Dutiful Daughter and Nancy

Andrews’ The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes. The latter Taal describes as a “a play of genre, a bit mad scientist, a bit horror, a bit of animation, a bit musical,” in which a female research scientist tries to develop insect and animal senses for human beings using herself as a guinea pig. A feature of Taal’s programme is the Pussy Riot on Stage event, following an exclusive preview of the documentary Pussy Versus Putin on Wednesday Jan 28.Taal argues that the battle lines of feminism have been redrawn over the years as to the meaning of the term. “Those questions are what sparked the programme, because there is such a multitude of opinions about what feminism is. You have femi-nists celebrating the fact there are no more sexy photos of women appearing in newspapers [the UK’s Sun newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch, this week announced its Page 3 models will no longer go topless], and there are those who say they don’t care if a woman wants to present herself in that way. I am not trying promote one vision of feminism. But the baseline is pretty clear. It’s about equality.” NC

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As Long As It TakesThere is also growing emphasis in the shorts selection on longer shorts shot to no particular length. “The festival shows films running from seven minutes to eight or nine hours, so it makes sense for us to run shorts of all lengths too. It’s why we renamed our programme As Long As It Takes.. it shouldn’t be about length,” says Van Hoof.

This year, there are 10 mid-length films, running 40 to 63 minutes, in the programme as single works, including US filmmaker Garrett Bradley’s Cover Me, about a young musician trying to find her place in New Orleans, and Serb Ognjen Glavonic’s Zivan Makes a Punk Festival about a young man’s battle to organise an annual punk festival in his small provincial village. Beyond the main programme, Van Hoof and his team also organise the evening Mind the Gap Nights at Rotterdam venue Worm. Friday’s programme will include a performance by Australian-British visual artist Sally Golding of her three-part “expanded cinema” set combining 16mm film projection, light and sound.

By Melanie GoodfellowMuch ink has been spilt, or rather computer keys tapped, on the relevance and survival of the film critic in a digital age of free blogs and collapsing budgets for print media. But, in a sign that all is not yet lost, the Association of Dutch Film Critics (KNF) is launching an updated version of the Critics’ Choice sidebar at IFFR, twelve years after it last featured in the programme, in 2003.Under the initiative, eight local and international film critics have selected a film for the festival, and in a contemporary twist they have also made a video essay to accompany the screening of their selection. KNF head Jan Pieter Ekker, who spearheaded the Critics’ Choice initiative with Dana Linssen, editor-in-chief of Dutch film magazine de Filmkrant, suggests video essays could be one way of invigorat-ing of the art of film criticism.“These aren’t just simply talking head films in which the critics explain their choices. They’ve all made very special films and they’re all very different. Dutch critic Hedwig van Driel, who selected Laggies, for example makes an amusing comment on the coming-of-age genre and how it differs for girls and

boys, while Kees Driessen gives an introduction to Studio Ghibli through his choice When Marnie Was There and talks about how it could be the last film to

come out of the studio.”Other participants include US film critic Kevin B. Lee, who has selected the Roger Ebert tribute Life Itself,

The Return of Critics’ Choice

Who Gives a F?!

EFA Repeats Demand to Free SentsovBy Nick CunninghamOn the eve of IFFR, the European Film Academy repeated its demand for the release of Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov, who has been held in a Moscow prison since May 10, 2014. Sentsov, was involved in supporting the Euromaidan protests in Kiev that opposed the Russian annexation of Crimea, was arrested by FSB security forces in his house in Simferopol on the Crimea. He is still awaiting trial.A campaign to free Sentsov, initiated by the EFA, was presented to the European Court of Civil Rights (ECHR) and an online petition demanding his immediate release has been signed by more than 36,000 people. A fund has been established by the EFA to support the director’s family during his imprisonment.UK producer and EFA deputy chairman Mike Downey commented: “The European Film Academy has been campaigning for the Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov, who still languishes in a Russian prison awaiting trial. This means that he has been imprisoned for eight months without trial. The Euro-pean Film Academy and many in the European film community believe that we need to try to give a new dimension to this mobilisation to get him released, by uniting our voices and the voices of all filmmakers and all those working in cinema all over the world.

“I have been working on a number of projects with Oleg’s producer Olga Zhurzhenko, including an adaptation of Julian Barnes’ The Porcupine. Following the success of his Gamer at IFFR (2012), Oleg had been instrumental in closing finance for his next project Rhino,” Downey continues. “Having had events for him in Venice, Toronto, San Sebastian, Berlin, Croatia, Warsaw and the Ukraine itself, we still battle to draw attention to his plight. We had an Empty Chair for him at the European Film Awards in Riga and his sister and producer came and addressed the General Assembly.“I am also organising a film week in London for him,

in the form of a Ukrainian Film Week or season, to draw attention to his plight. It’s not looking good for this young man – and we feel that we need to keep up the pressure on the authorities in Moscow to release him or at least give him a fair trial.”IFFR director Rutger Wolfson added: “The festival will continue to create visibility for Oleg’s plight and to play a part in rallying support to get him released. The great thing is that we have such a large audience, and the social media for our festival is huge, so our main aim will be to inform them again and again about what is going on and by doing so create more support for Oleg.”

and Adrian Martin and Cristina Alvárez-Lopez, who jointly chose a restoration of Walérian Borowczyk’s Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne), a controversial cult adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale.  Dutch critic Bianca Stigter has a 30-minute film entitled Three Minutes Thirteen Minutes Thirty Minutes revolving around a 76-year-old home movie shot in the Jewish town of Nasielsk in Poland in 1938, just before most of the community was wiped out in the Holocaust. It is inspired by American writer Glenn Kurtz’s book Three Minutes in Poland, docu-menting his research into the people seen in three minutes of footage shot by his émigré grandfather David Kurtz when he returned from the US to his Polish town of birth on holiday. The film is screening in a special event entitled The Return of the Critics’ Choice: Will the Video Essay Save Film Criticism? on Sunday, January 25.“None of these films would have played in the festival if the critics had not selected them,” says Ekker. The initiative is also supplemented by a collection of written essays entitled (The Return of the) Critics’ Choice.

The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes

Zivan Makes a Punk Festival Oleg Sentsov at IFFR in 2012

Dana Linssen & Jan Pieter Ekker

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INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM4

Small Screen OfferBy Nick CunninghamRob Duyser, IFFR’s video library czar on the 4th floor of de Doelen, estimates that by the first Saturday of IFFR he will have 75% of the festival’s selection available to accredited guests. “And we will keep up with what people deliver in terms of resolution and video quality,” he adds. “The wi-fi service has been improved so it’s compatible with iPads, laptops, Windows and Macs. But people won’t notice because it will just work.”He outlines further the changes to the delegates’ viewing experience this year. “Although we try to keep it the same quality as in the past, we have added some features that people have missed over the years, which are generally that delegates can now access viewing history using the software without asking for anybody’s help. So they can watch, rate and tag comments on the films, and get these summed up in a list for personal use only. The organization don’t get to see your comments – just you. This is important. And then the software emails you the list. You just press the big blue button at the top of the page.”When asked to offer up amusing examples of the odd requests he has received from delegates over the years, Duyser’s reply is alarmingly serious. He has, he claims, been asked on occasion to pass over copies of

all the films in the library. “Yes, that has happened a few times,” he says. “There have been attempts at bribery, but we take security and people’s property very seriously, which is why it is a closed network, only accessible by people in de Doelen and with an accreditation to the festival. We keep it very, very secure. And yes, it was a guest who asked.”

Duyser is one of the busiest workers at IFFR, making sure that the video facilities tick over precisely. Does he therefore ever get the time to occupy one of the booths himself to watch a film or two? “No, I prefer the festival screenings to get the full experience – to dive deeply into the medium of cinema, with all the sound and the popcorn,” he replies.

In an age of non-stop 24-hour information, the battle for global hearts and minds has never been fiercer. IFFR’S Signals: Everyday Propaganda sidebar offers a timely exploration of the modern images and techniques of propaganda. Melanie Goodfellow reports

“We’re all being bombarded with propaganda, but people don’t really recognise it as such because it’s coming from other people rather than the state,” says IFFR programmer Inge de Leeuw, who curated the sidebar alongside her Russian colleague Evgeny Gusyatinskiy.Russian director Oleg Mavromatti’s No Place For Fools, which world premieres at IFFR, splices together the video blogs of pro-Putin activist Sergey Astahov, a gay man who now preaches homophobia after being indoctrinated by the Church and undergoing psychiatric treatment for his “illness”.Other Russian titles include Alexey Fedorchennko’s Angels of Revolution, set against the backdrop of the Serbian Kazym Revolution against Soviet collectivi-sation polices of the 1930s; Esfir Shub’s 1929 anti-US propaganda film Today and Alexander Shein’s rarely screened 1971 Internationale, in which the filmmaker mashes propaganda messages with avant-garde experimentation. The latter two films are playing in a double bill today (Jan 23, 20:00 LantarenVenster 6), with a live piano accompaniment from film journalist & DJ Kevin Toma. Other films in the line-up include Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake, which examines how the West has simplified narratives with tragic consequences. The BBC documentary maker will give a talk on modern propaganda as part of the sidebar. Peter Watkin’s 1965 The War Game, about an imag-inary atomic bomb attack on southeast of England, makes a nice companion piece, says De Leeuw. Tom Harper’s IFFR opener War Book is also listed in the propaganda line-up.Alongside the films, the sidebar has also taken over the first floor of the Schouwburg with a series of installations.

On one wall, a bank of TVs plays propaganda video footage related to the themes of war, pop culture, activism and the state. Interactive installations include Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev’s Newstweek,

through which users can “hack” into spoof sites representing top news outlets and change the news. “People can go on to the sites, play around with the news and then tweet the result,” says De Leeuw.

SpeakeasyBy Nick Cunningham Tom Barman isn’t exactly a Rotterdam veteran, but he does have IFFR form. The Flemish rock-star-cum-filmmaker successfully pitched Any Way the Wind Blows at CineMart in 2001 and was the festival’s de facto DJ-in-residence during the noughties. Now he is back at IFFR with twin duties: presenting the IFFR Late Nights talk shows and drumming up support for his new film project alongside prolific Flemish producer Bart van Langendonck.He may front two bands (dEUS and Magnus) but Barman still admits to being nervous ahead of the talk shows. “But that’s always a good thing, at least in my case it is. I have interviewed people for the Dutch TV series Shot on Location, mostly directors but a few actors here and there. That was my maiden voyage into it. I’ve interviewed musicians. But this is not for

TV. If it was, I wouldn’t have done it because that’s a different ball game.”The IFFR Late Nights offer a mash-up of conver-sation, music and novelty (in the form of a canine-themed ‘dogs in film’ quiz every night). At tonight’s first Late Night, IFFR chief Rutger Wolfson joins directors Remy van Heugten (Gluckauf, Tiger Competition) and Damian Marcano (God Loves the Fighter, Bright Future Premieres) to answer Barman’s questions. “These two films are great – it’s nice to start with something that I like myself”, Barman says. Not to say he’s averse to talking to directors of films he doesn’t find to his own taste. “I’m not going to be rude or anything, but I will ask why the hell they did this or that.” Saturday night’s guests include Atlantic. director Jan-Willem Ewijk and the

film’s composer Mourad Belouali. “It’s not going to be show biz. The people who come and see it are interested in movies and that’ s what we are going to talk about.”Barman’s own film project is titled The Alcoholics, which he refers to as a wild, trashy noir. “Bart tells me that IFFR is kind of like his second living room – he spends a lot of time there each year. The fact that I’m there won’t change that. I’ve been working for a couple of years on the treatment and I am in the midst of dialogues right now, so it’s exciting. It’s a suspense with some other elements, and will be in English. There’ s not much more to say about it other than I’ll definitely finish a couple of versions before the summer and then we’re looking for money. And then I’ll shoot it next year.”

HERETIC REACHES OUT TO IFFR TITLEFledgling Athens-based sales outfit Heretic Outreach yesterday announced its pick-up of Margarita Manda’s Forever, selected in Bright Future Premieres. The film concerns the growing affection between two people who travel on the same train to work each day. The film won the Silver Pyramid for Best Director at the Cairo International Fim Festival. It was also selected for Thessaloniki International Film Festival. The company is also selling Marinus Groothof ’s The Sky Above Us, which is world premiering in the inaugural IFFR Live programme on Wednesday 28 January. NC

Heaven- sent

By Mark Baker“There were various factors that made me want to make this film”, Dutch artist turned filmmaker Peter van Houten says of his World Premiere in Spectrum, La vie de Jean-Marie (The Life of Jean-Marie) – his fourth world premiere at IFFR. “These were the idyllic landscape and the hard life of the mountain people; the idealism of a Dutch father who bought a mountain in the Pyrenees to build a paradise for his large family, and finally of course Jean-Marie, the eldest son who has his own unique way of moving between many different contrasts and conflicts.” La vie de Jean-Marie is a poetic, 166-minute portrait of septuagenarian Dutch pastor Jean-Marie, who looks after twenty-five parishes in the stunning countryside of the rural French Pyrenees. “I knew that the length of the film would make it difficult to programme, so I was pleasantly surprised IFFR has programmed four screenings”, Van Houten says. The shoot was also a protracted affair – Van Houten filmed Jean-Marie over a six-year period, from 2004 to 2010. “One Sunday morning, I attended a mass performed by Jean-Marie in a living room. Suddenly I knew Jean-Marie should be my lead character”, the director recalls. “He agreed – in fact he gave me carte blanche. He liked being filmed, referring to the camera as ‘a curious little boy.’”

An unexpected turn of events brought an added bonus to the film, in the form of a ‘love interest’. “During filming, Jean-Marie surprised both me and himself by introducing a big twist to the story – a ‘gift from heaven’, as he calls it. This drastically changed the original idea of the film and the editing process – as well as Jean-Marie’s life”, the director says.

This “twist” also helps develop another line running through the film, parallel to the narrative and relat-ing to “Catholic visual thought”, as the director calls it. “By this, I mean the visualisation of Biblical stories as we know them, for example from the history of painting – think Pierro della Francesca, Rembrandt, et cetera”, Van Houten says. “This tradition lives on in Jean-Marie: a tradition of being light, cheerful and simple in nature. Jean-Marie’s new life partner was ‘sent from God and fell like a gift from the heavens’ – this is how Jean-Marie describes what has happened to him. God heard and answered his life-long longing for a wife, companion, sister.”

The other storylines involving Jean-Marie also merge seamlessly with this “Catholic tradition of visual thought”, and in the film Jean-Marie himself speaks openly this in an effective, long monologue. “Jean-Marie has accepted this gift late in life without any qualms or internal conflict”, Van Houten says. “This enables him to create his own individual freedom, alongside the strict Catholic dogmas. Jean-Marie is still a priest, but at the same time accepts this gift from God and his priesthood.”

La vie de Jean-Marie

Fri 23 Jan 16:45 LV1; Mon 26 Jan 09:30 CI2 (P&I); Tue 27 Jan

19:15 LV5; Wed 28 Jan 13:30 CI4 (P&I); Cinerama 7 Thu 29

Jan 09:00; Fri 30 Jan 16:30 LV6

Signals subverts the propaganda machine

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Inge de Leeuw & Evgeny Gusyatinskiy

5INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

Backpacking through Laos in search of adventure and authenticity, director Daan Veldhuizen was intrigued by the relationship between the local people and the increasing influx of tourists. By Ruben Demasure

The idea for his second feature-length documentary was thus born. Banana Pancakes and the Children of Sticky Rice premieres in IFFR’s Bright Future section.The isolated Buddhist village of Muang Ngoi in north-ern Laos proved to be an ideal microcosm for the film. Solely accessible by river, tourists flood the village during the dry season. The filmmaker was fortunate to arrive just as electricity was about to reach this tiny town, providing him with the ideal opportunity to capture the place in several different stages. During preparation, Veldhuizen met Shai, the son of the owners of the guesthouse where he was staying, who later introduced him to his childhood friend, Khao. Shai is an educated entrepreneur who returned from the city but is struggling with himself and the new possibilities, while Khao is a traditional farmer and steady family man. The pair eventually became the protagonists of the film. The title depicts the film’s central confrontation in culinary terms. Banana pancakes are a menu item adapted to the tastes of Western backpackers, often served by a generation of Laotians who – because of tourism – no longer have to live from the production of sticky rice alone. So the locals discover a taste for Western customs while the visitors hunger for tradi-tion and authenticity. Veldhuizen intended to make the film feel like a journey and sets up the documentary like a three-stage rocket. Stage one is an observation of the village and its inhabitants, in an almost anthropological

manner. In stage two, tourism arrives, before in stage three frictions arise between the protagonists and the filmmaker. The documentary slowly shifts from observational to more participatory. On a couple of occasions, the invisible wall between the locals and the filmmaker is breached. He only reacts when they acknowledge his presence by looking into the camera, offering him a drink or taking his picture. “In a certain sense, a documentary and tourism are the same: we want to see something, but hope not to influence it”, Veldhuizen explains. “That’s impossible!” This gradual journey also permeates in the alluring visual style of the film. Veldhuizen creates a candid

feel by including objects in the foreground of the frame. Carefully constructed compositions evolve towards a more dynamic way of filming. We all know curry westerns and spaghetti westerns. Is this a kind of sticky rice western, where invaders armed with their Lonely Planet guides face traditional civilization in the village’s dusty main street? No – it was essential for Veldhuizen to show that the changes brought about by tourism are mostly welcomed by the locals. “I wanted to make a documentary where the tourist is the one who’s being watched by the local, in-stead of the other way around”, Veldhuizen explains. “Now, I can’t wait to invite Khao and Shai back and serve them hutspot and Dutch cheese”, he smiles.

Banana Pancakes and the Children of Sticky Rice

Fri 23 Jan 18:30 PA6; Sat 24 Jan 22:30 CI3; Mon 26 Jan

22:00 CI2; Wed 28 Jan 09:00 CI4 (P&I); Sat 31 Jan 09:30 PA3

The protagonist of Impressions of a Drowned Man wakes to find he has no recollections – not of the previous night nor, pertinently, of his identity. By Oris Aigbokhaevbolo

What follows is a journey towards the acquisition of that misplaced identity through apparently random encounters. It is a ‘minimal plot’ as director Kyros Papavassiliou admits; yet this meagre narrative holds a dense exploration of several themes. What exactly is the self? Can man exist without memory? Would he be satisfied to live without it?Setting such complexities within an insubstantial plot is the first indication of the contrast employed in Papavassiliou’s storytelling. Halfway through, upon the revelation that this unnamed man is Kostas Kary-otakis, the great Greek poet who committed suicide by drowning in 1928, it becomes clear that the pervading mood – of contrast and a sober surrealism – is similar to the aura created in Karyotakis’ poetry. But how much is the film a version – or perhaps a perversion – of Karyotakis’ life?“I highly respect Karyotakis’ work,” says Papavassiliou. “But I refrained from reading him for the period of making the film. At the first stages of the project I realised that this shouldn’t be a biographical film at all. I kept only the impression that I had in my mind about his work – this is comprised of a highly contrast-ing sense, a contrast of tenderness and harshness, of happiness and bitterness, of resignation and struggle.”Whatever else it is – and its meaning will be open interpretation – Impressions is not a biopic. “It is as if the protagonist is given an arbitrary name that coin-cides with that of a well-known poet,” Papavassiliou adds. “It was my conscious choice to present a story

about an ordinary man in a rather complex situation.”A poet’s sensibility abides in the film’s condensation of a life into just over an hour, with the focus on transmitting sensations. It is thus unsurprising to learn that Papavassiliou is himself a published poet. Indeed, much of Impressions of a Drowned Man is sound-tracked by silence and delicately unobtrusive sounds, perceptible but subtle, akin to a poem’s metre. This effect Papavassiliou attributes to the “luck” he had working with musician Nikos Veliotis, sound designer Persefoni Miliou, and sound mixer Kostas Fylaktides. The expertise of all three combines with Papavassiliou’s own training as a musician to make dialogue a bit player, serving as narrative signposting while silence and score are passengers on the poet’s journey to a recovery of the self. Kostas has two altering encounters in the film. The first is with his ex-lover Maria Polydouri, who identifies him. Played by actress Marisha Triantafyl-lidou, a friend of the director in whose house the idea for the film was borne, she serves as the film’s emotional centre. The other encounter is with an actor playing Kary-otakis in a television series. The ‘real’ Karyotakis meets with this actor at the film’s climax. Their meeting is conveyed by silence and subtitles, so the inversion of another great poet’s words captures the scene: it is little sound, no fury, signifying everything. Almost.

Impressions of a Drowned Man

Hivos Tiger Awards Competition Fri 23 Jan 18:45 PA4; Sat 24 Jan 12:15PA2; Mon 26 Jan

22:15 PA5; Tue 27 Jan 09:15 DWBZ (P&I); Wed 28 Jan 16:45

LV5; Sat 31 Jan 09:30 CI3

Appetites and Aspirations

There Are No Poets Here

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PRESS & INDUSTRY SCREENINGS10.00 11.00 12.00 13.00 14.00 15.00 16.00 17.00 18.00 19.00 20.00 21.00 22.00 23.00 24.0009.00

de Doelen Jurriaanse Zaal

VRIJDAG 23-01-2015

de Doelen Jurriaanse Zaal

Impressions of a Drowned ManKyros Papavassiliou 12:30 – 13:52

TG NorfolkMartin Radich 17:45 – 19:12

TG

de Doelen Willem Burger Zaal

Li Wen at East LakeLi Luo 09:15 – 11:12

SPPathé 5

Poet on a Business TripJu Anqi 12:15 – 13:58

SP

White CoalGeorg Tiller 09:30 – 10:40

BFCinerama 2

German AngstJörg Buttgereit / Michal Kosakowski / Andreas Marschall 11:15 – 13:05

RR Me quedo contigoArtemio Narro 13:30 – 15:09

WF El legadoRoberto Anjari-Rossi 18:30 – 19:53

BF ValedictorianMatthew Yeager 20:30 – 21:48

BF Le paradisAlain Cavalier 22:30 – 23:40

SP

God Loves the FighterDamian Marcano 09:15 – 10:51

BFCinerama 4

No Place for FoolsOleg Mavromatti 11:30 – 12:52

EP Broken LandStéphanie Barbey / Luc Peter 13:15 – 14:30

EP JaujaLisandro Alonso 15:00 – 16:48

SP Portret van een tuinRosie Stapel 17:30 – 19:08

+ Ik ben AliceSander Burger 20:00 – 21:20

LL SolosJoanna Lombardi 22:00 – 23:32

BF

DINAMO P&I Screenings 1combined programme 10:00 – 11:31

SH

Undulant FeverAndo Hiroshi 09:30 – 11:28

SP CartBoo Ji-Young 11:45 – 13:29

WF Black StoneRoh Gyeong-Tae 14:00 – 15:32

SP A Midsummer’s FantasiaJang Kun-Jae 16:30 – 18:06

SP

de Doelen Jurriaanse Zaal

10:00DINAMO P&I Screenings: 1 SHVerzamelprogramma, 77 minDINAMO (Distribution Network of Artists’ Moving Image Organizations) distributors show recently acquired work. These titles can also be seen in IFFR’s video library during the festival.

12:30Impressions of a Drowned Man [wp] TGKyros Papavassiliou, Cyprus/Greece/Slovenia, 2015, DCP, 82 min, Greek, e.s.A man who doesn’t know who he is meets his former love. She tells him he is a famous poet, Kostas Karyotakis, who killed himself in 1928. Every year he returns on the anniversary of his death. A day that has taken place many, many times before plays out again. Will Kostas again make the same decisions?

17:45Norfolk [wp] TGMartin Radich, United Kingdom, 2015, DCP, 87 min, EnglishA father and son live isolated from the outside world. Following a confl ict, a painful family story unfolds. Who is in the right and who is wrong remains a mystery, however - also for the audience. The landscape of Norfolk forms the perfect backdrop to this at times dis-concerting but always visually stunning drama.

de Doelen Willem Burger Zaal

09:30Undulant Fever [ip] SP•paars01•

Ando Hiroshi, Japan, 2014, DCP, 118 min, Japanese, e.s.A female student falls for a senior, but the senior not really for her. He is willing to go to bed with her, but doesn’t feel love. The couple embark on a painful yet passi-onate experiment. A 1970s story in 1970s images, based on the legendary book by the then very young writer Kei Nakazawa. Nominated for The Big Screen Award

11:45Cart [ep] WF•blauw•

Boo Ji-Young, South Korea, 2014, DCP, 104 min, Korean, e.s.Some female employees of a Korean hypermarket are suddenly side-lined by the management. In an environment in which the customer is always right and the staff subservient, these women - against all expectations - fi ght back. The man, or in this case, woman in the street, fi ghting for her rights.

14:00Black Stone [wp] SP•paars01•

Roh Gyeong-Tae, South Korea/France, 2015, DCP, 92 min, Korean/Tagalog/English, e.s.Artist/fi lmmaker Roh has an impres-sively sombre world view; based on the sad fate of a Filipino-Korean family, he shows a decayed society where it’s im-possible to distinguish between material and immaterial pollution. Those who can cope with this are rewarded with moments of mercy and magic.

16:30A Midsummer’s Fantasia [ep] SP•paars01•

Jang Kun-Jae, South Korea/Japan, 2014, DCP, 96 min, Korean/Japanese, e.s.In his third feature (in two parts), festival favourite Jang Kun-Jae also presents an alter ego: a Korean director who, in black-and-white, prepares a co-production in a remote area of Japan. The second half shows the results in colour: a moving retrospective of a pos-sible love between a guide and a female Korean visitor.

Pathé 509:15

Li Wen at East Lake [wp] SP•paars01•

Li Luo, China, 2015, Video, 117 min, Mandarin, e.s.As with everything in life, the same goes for East Lake, a threatened lake near the expanding mega city of Wuhan. You can get worked up about it and get involved - or you can think, it won’t affect me. Fortunately there’s the intriguing new fi lm by Li Luo, which brings to an end these doubts.

12:15Poet on a Business Trip [wp] SP•paars01•

Ju Anqi, China, 2015, DCP, 103 min, Mandarin, e.s.In all its simplicity, a completely unique fi lm, shot more than 10 years ago and only now edited. A poet sets off on a ‘business trip’ through inhospitable Xinjiang. The physically exhausting trip provides an existential brothel visit, bumping on bad roads and a glimpse of a disappearing world, but also 16 melancholy poems.

Cinerama 209:30

White Coal [wp] BF•geel•

Georg Tiller, Austria, 2015, DCP, 70 min, Cantonese, e.s.An industrial fi lm on two kinds of labour: socialist and capitalist. A poetic investigation of human relations with the soil and the Earth. A striking journey from Poland to Taiwan that makes us think, contemplate and dream. Pure fi lm.

11:15German Angst [wp] RR•blauw•

Jörg Buttgereit/Michal Kosakowski/Andreas Marschall, Germany, 2015, DCP, 110 min, English/German, e.s.Hop on the bus to everyday hell and meet a woman who makes a sick fuck pay; a deaf-mute couple attacked by neo-Nazis; and a horny bobo who meets his worst desire tripping on mandrake juice. Part underground AV art, part genre movie, from your neighbours who fear just one thing: the future.

13:30Me quedo contigo [wp] WF•blauw•

Artemio Narro, Mexico, 2015, DCP, 99 min, Spanish, e.s.It all starts off lightly enough, with Spanish Natalia arriving in Mexico to visit her boyfriend. But don’t get too comfortable: when she and a group of wild chicks meet an unsuspecting cowboy, the fi lm takes a dark turn. A shocking commentary on violence in Mexico, in which the male and female roles are reversed.

18:30El legado [wp] BF•geel•

Roberto Anjari-Rossi, Germany/Chile, 2015, DCP, 83 min, Spanish, e.s.Grandparents can be much closer to grandchildren than their mothers or fathers. This is true of one family living in a small village in Chile. There are just two of them - aging grandmother and her young granddaughter. It’s impossible to take our eyes off them. A fi lm debut of unique tenderness and pure magic.

20:30Valedictorian [wp] BF•geel•

Matthew Yeager, USA, 2015, DCP, 78 min, EnglishBen is the typical Brooklyn hipster with his band, job and girlfriend. But is that all there is? Without any real reason or big drama, he goes off in a completely different direction. Ben switches from protagonist into passer-by, about whom his vague acquaintances only occasio-nally think. A striking portrait of this individualistic generation.

22:30Le paradis [ip] SP•paars01•

Alain Cavalier, France, 2014, DCP, 70 min, French, e.s.A meditation on life and death and an associative self-portrait, all in one: in Le paradis, Alain Cavalier threads together everyday observations, memories and a motley collection of objects and stories from his personal inventory and turns them into a salutation to life. A fi lm against forgetting.

Cinerama 409:15

God Loves the Fighter [ep] BF•geel•

Damian Marcano, Trinidad and Tobago, 2013, DCP, 96 min, English, e.s.Raw, realistic take on life in the eastern part of Port of Spain, Trinidad - murder capital of the Caribbean. Young Charlie wants to do the right thing, but has to try and survive this concrete jungle. Good and evil meet on a particular fateful night. Yellow Robin Award winner Curacao IFFR 2014.

11:30No Place for Fools [wp] EP •blauw•

Oleg Mavromatti, Russia/Bulgaria, 2015, DCP, 82 min, Russian, e.s.Sergey Astahov is a gay man converted by Church and state propaganda into an orthodox pro-Putin activist. Composed of terrifying images from Astahov’s blog, this documentary by contempo-rary artist Oleg Mavromatti is the most radical insight into today’s Russia and its ideological clashes.

13:15Broken Land [ip] EP •blauw•

Stéphanie Barbey/Luc Peter, Switzerland, 2014, DCP, 75 min, English/Spanish, e.s.The Mexican-US border is a sacred place for many of the Americans based there. They guard it furiously in order to prevent illegal migration and live in constant fear of the Other. This fascinating documentary explores their lifestyle, determined by an ideology of self-protection and militarism.

15:00Jauja SP•paars01•

Lisandro Alonso, Argentina/Netherlands/Mexico/Denmark, 2014, DCP, 108 min, Danish/Spanish, e.s.The vision of Lisandro Alonso, the blin-ding photography of Kaurismäki’s re-gular cameraman and the use of actor/musician Viggo Mortensen combined to ensure a magic result. A Danish military engineer sets off in 19th-century Patago-nia looking for his missing daughter. A mysterious masterpiece. Nominated for The Big Screen Award

17:30Portret van een tuin [wp] + •blauw•

Rosie Stapel, Netherlands, 2015, DCP, 98 min, Dutch, e.s.At a centuries-old Dutch estate, a garde-ner and an 85-year-old pruning master work passionately and painstakingly on perfecting the fruit trees and crops. An ode to the garden and gardeners. Sowing, potting, thinning, pruning and fi nally reaping. Accompanied by beauti-ful lute music by Jozef van Wissem.

20:00Ik ben Alice [wp] LL •blauw•

Sander Burger, Netherlands, 2015, DCP, 80 min, Dutch, e.s.Three elderly single women receive a re-markable visitor: as an experiment, care robot Alice is placed in their home for a while. This newcomer is not without an effect on the elderly ladies. Nor on us: a poignant, at times heartrending and morally thoroughly confusing documentary.

22:00Solos [wp] BF•geel•

Joanna Lombardi, Peru, 2015, DCP, 92 min, Spanish, e.s.Four young people travel with a mobile cinema and fl opped art-house fi lm to remote villages in the jungles of Peru. Charming refl ection on cinema, life, friendship and loneliness; beautifully shot by the brilliant Chilean Inti Briones. The world premiere of the second fi lm by the maker of the successful Casaden-tro (2012).

“That’s impossible!”

19

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