ROTTERDAM 2012 In the midst of public funding cuts —
and the threat of them — for the arts all across Europe, Rotterdam’s relevance seems to be rising rather than diminish- ing. Its co-production market, CineMart, is the original and looks particularly strong this year. New projects from nota- ble talents such as Kelly Reichardt, Attenberg director Athina Rachel Tsan- gari and Alexei Popogrebsky are being presented, while some of Europe’s big- gest sales agents, distributors and broad- casters will be attending, including Channel 4 and Arte. “It is a sign festivals will become
more important in the industry now that other parts of the industry are being weakened by the economic crisis,” Wolf- son suggests. There are certain titles in IFFR’s offi -
The world premiere of Lucas Belvaux’s Belgian drama 38 Witnesses will open the festival Proud to be different
Known for its fearless programming, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Jan 25-Feb 5) is a hotbed of discovery. Geoffrey Macnab reports
makes it such a distinctive event. “Weird”, “sick”, “hilarious”, “poetic” and “daring” are some of the many adjectives plucked from what journalists and pro- grammers have written previously about fi lms in the festival. “It is clear we’re not a mainstream fi lm festival so we have very outspoken films in our programme,” says festival director Rutger Wolfson of IFFR’s repu- tation for both diversity and perversity. IFFR is nothing if not paradoxical. On the one hand, it is one of the biggest audience festivals in the world, posting around 350,000 admissions. On the other, it is self-consciously esoteric: a festival of discovery that champions art- house fi lms and marginal voices.
T
Rotterdam is the event where Christo- pher Nolan fi rst won international atten- tion a decade ago for his low-budget feature Following and where such cele- brated films as Alexander Sokurov’s Mother And Son and Catherine Breillat’s Romance received their world premieres. The challenge IFFR faces is how to
■ 2 International Film Festival Rotterdam January 2012
he slogans on the poster for the 2012 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) hint at what
maintain its relevance to the interna- tional industry as well as to the Dutch cinema-goers who attend its screenings in such huge numbers. Sandwiched between Sundance and Berlin, it faces ferocious competition for titles. On the eve of this year’s event, Wolfson is sanguine and upbeat. At a time of ruth- less cost-cutting in public spending on the arts in the Netherlands, IFFR looks secure. The new cultural cycle will run from 2013-16. It has secured a new main sponsor, Curacao-based Fundashon Bon Intenshon, and has put in place various fund-raising schemes, among them the Tiger Film Patrons Fund.
Closing night fi lm The Hunter
At the same time, Wolfson and his team have decided to make the pro- gramme “significantly smaller”. He acknowledges that in previous years, fi lms from different parts of the festival “were competing too much for attention”. The aim is to give the programme profile more focus. Bright Future will be around 20% smaller than in recent years and there will also be fewer titles in the
ention” Signals strand.
cial selection that are sure to pique buy- ers’ curiosity. Among them are the world premiere of Lucas Belvaux’s 38 Wit- nesses (38 Témoins), a drama about a woman who returns home to find a crime has been committed in her street, which opens the festival, and Daniel Net- theim’s closing title The Hunter, about a mercenary’s hunt for the last Tasmanian tiger starring Willem Dafoe and Frances O’Connor. Both are titles Berlin would have been
keen to showcase. Wolfson credits vet- eran programmer Dicky Parlevliet with snaring the new Belvaux fi lm. “She has excellent connections in France,” he says of the title that is being sold by Films Distribution. “[Parlevliet] had that fi lm on her radar for a very long time and it was fi nished just in time for us to make selections for our opening fi lm.” As for The Hunter, that film had
passed through CineMart and so already had a Rotterdam connection before pre- miering at Toronto. Belvaux will be in attendance, as
should other internationally feted auteurs such as Aki Kaurismaki (whose Le Havre is screening in Spectrum), Takashi Miike (in Spectrum with Ace Attorney), Andrea Arnold (in Spectrum with Wuthering Heights) and Amster- dam-based Steve McQueen (whose Shame is in Bright Future). The departure of Ludmila Cvikova,
one of IFFR’s most prominent program- mers, to the Doha Film Institute in 2011, initially threatened to weaken the festi- val. Cvikova, who specialised in Eastern European and Russian cinema, secured notable premieres such as Room And A
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