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The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) got underway on Thursday evening with Dutch director Michiel ten Horn’s gender-blending, crime caper Fabula.
Set in the southern border province of Limberg, the feature stars Fedja van Huêt (the psychotic father in Christian Tafdrup’s 2022 Sundance breakout Speak No Evil) as a strung-out, misfit criminal trying to shake off a streak of intergenerational bad luck.
When a big drug deal goes wrong, he embarks on a personal journey imbued with fantasy, folklore and magic realism as he attempts to put things right.
Fabula was the first feature by a Dutch director to open the festival since Sacha Polak’s English-language drama Dirty God in 2019.
“It was fantastic to come across this film. I saw it as a work in progress, but just a few scenes gave me a pretty good idea that we were dealing with a filmmaker and a film that is unlike anything we’ve seen in recent production in the Netherlands,” says IFFR Director Vanja Kaludjercic.
“It has great production value and crossover potential. There is this element of crime comedy that plays with genre, but then uses some fantastical elements, but it’s skilfully done because at the core of it is this really a heartfelt story of a band of misfits.”
Kaludjercic also points to the strong Dutch presence at the festival across the different sidebars.
“It’s a cause for celebration. When you look at how many Dutch films we have in the program, it gives you a good idea of the scale and variety of what is being produced.”
This is being further amplified by a new dedicated Dutch Day in the IFFR Pro industry program, featuring a conversation with director Ena Sendijarević and Renée Soutendijk, and a focus on the country’s strength as a co-production partner.
“It’s about making sure that the role IFFR plays in positioning Dutch industry in the international context is strengthened,” says Stewart, who also notes the arrival of festival and labs veteran Marten Rabarts as the new head of the IFFR Pro industry sidebar this year.
This edition marks Stewart’s second at the festival in the role of managing director.
“For me it’s exciting because it’s my first full cycle. Over the course of the year, we’ve delivered a new strategic plan in November and secured our ministry subsidy and our municipality subsidy for the next four editions,” she says.
Stewart says the national subsidy of roughly €2M ($2.03M) a year and €1.45M ($1.5M) from the city does not represent a “uplift”, which would have been useful in the current inflationary environment, but adds they are still pleased with the outcome given cuts in state cultural spending elsewhere.
“We’re going into this edition with a sense of having found a really solid groove in terms of how we’re framing the business, the development and the strategy, and of course we’ve had a full year of working together and found such good dynamic,” she says.
“This time last year, we were working on the funding applications during the festival, so I feel like my body wasn’t fully located in the festival. This year will be different, and we’ve made a commitment to one another to have fun.”
Opening film Push has been programmed in IFFR’s Limelight sidebar aimed at arthouse, indie and world cinema titles with broad appeal due out in cinemas in the Netherlands in the coming months.
Its crowd-pleaser potential flies in the face of the IFFR’s reputation in some parts of the industry that the event is focused purely on hardcore arthouse films and more esoteric and niche fare.
“We’re trying to move this maxim of, ‘This is an IFFR film, and this isn’t an IFFR film’. It’s true that IFFR has championed very singular voices, often in the niche, avant-garde and experimental sphere, but it’s a tiny part of the much bigger truth of what IFFR is,” says Kaludjercic.
She cites the example of Japanese director Miike Takashi who was first at the festival in 2000 with his breakout film Audition and returns this year for the international premiere of his more mainstream street-fighting drama Blazing Fists (Blue Fight) in the Limelight section.
“I analyzed all 50 years of the festival before becoming director and you can see there is an abundance of classical cinema, more popular stuff and these unique voices that it’s hard to even categorize with a specific genre or category,” she continues.
“This is what we’re trying to really emphasize, and I think you can see in the last four, five years that a much greater balance is being achieved.”
Within this, a key IFFR focus remains scouting and supporting filmmakers who may not be on the radar of more mainstream festivals.
The 14 titles in the main Tiger Competition range from Iranian director Amirali Navee’s Sunshine Express, exploring the mechanics of totalitarian regimes through the prism of a role-playing game; to photographer and visual artist Sammy Baloji’s film essay L’arbre de l’authenticité, exploring the Democratic Republic of Congo’s colonial past and how that is tied up with the fate of the Congolese rainforests and their role as consumers of carbon dioxide; and Varsha Bharath’s energetic coming-of-age tale Bad Girl going inside the mind of a rebellious Indian teenager navigating adolescence within the confines of a wealthy, conservative family.
Kaludjercic also notes the festival’s deeper research into specific territories such as Indonesia, which has been given special attention this year with 17 titles hailing from the country in the selection, including closing night film This City Is A Battlefield by Mouly Surya. The focus also ties in with the signing of a co-production treaty between Indonesia and the Netherlands last December.
Other territories of particular interest include India and Japan, which make hundreds of films each year, she says, but with relatively few breaking out internationally.
“It’s usually just a handful of familiar names circling around, which is fantastic but there’s so much more to show,” says Kaludjercic.
“We try to look at each of these countries and see what is happening in experimental cinema, in classical filmmaking, and the box office hits we really want to pay attention to, and show all that.”
Another territory in the spotlight is Iran with the presence of Mohamad Rasoulof for a screening of his Oscar nominated feature The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, as well as works another such as Competition title Sunshine Express and The Crowd, exploring middle-class young adult life in contemporary Tehran, in the Bright Future strand, the festival’s second feature film competition.
Rasoulof will also participate in a discussion on Cinema and the Rise of Authoritarianism as part of the festival’s Tiger Talks line-up, while Saeed Nouri will explore popular Iranian cinema from the 1940s to the 50s in a talk entitled “The History of Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema.
Unfortunately, The Seed of the Sacred Fig lead actress Soheila Golestani, who was unveiled as part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s (IFFR) Tiger Competition jury, has been barred from leaving Iran to travel to the festival.
“Iran has some incredibly strong voices, when you see what is happening in there in the underground filmmaking sphere, with people who are so courageous and fearless, presenting works we could not imagine seeing, five, six years ago,” says Vanja Kaludjercic.
Other highlights of the Tiger Talks program include a conversation with Oscar-nominated The Brutalist cinematographer Lol Crawley, who is being honored with the festival’s Robby Müller Award, created in memory of the late Dutch cameraman and Wim Wenders, Lars von Trier, and Jim Jarmusch collaborator.
IFFR’s parallel Big Talks program will feature dialogues between Cate Blanchett and Guy Maddin; Cheryl Dunye and Albertina Carri as well as Costa Gavras and Sungji Oh among others.
“The talk between Cate and Guy is around their mutual appreciation and interest in some of the other things that IFFR stands for around short films, performance and the kinds of works that are more installation based and intersectional,” says Stewart.
She highlights Maddin as another filmmaker who has also been feted by the festival earlier on in his career by IFFR – which hosted his installation Cowards Bend The Knee, for example, in 2003 – and has remained loyal to Rotterdam as his filmography has broadened.
Other Big Talk speakers include U.S. filmmaker Alex Ross Perry who is attending with Videoheaven, his epic, three-hour exploration of the rise and fall of the video store and the culture surrounding it.
The movie and a second work by Rotterdam artist artist Gyz La Rivière, Videotheek Marco, have sparked standalone focus Hold Video in Your Hands, which is framed by these two films and includes a raft of VHS culture-inspired movies, including classics such as Be Kind Rewind and Video Nasty.
“It was incredible to have two filmmakers, one from Rotterdam, and one from New York finishing films on VHS culture at the same time,” comments Kaludjercic.
It is one of four thematic strands alongside retrospectives devoted to feminist documentarian Katja Raganelli and Ukrainian auteur Sergii Masloboishchykov and a focus taking its cue from the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955.
