The first film from the Tiger competition for new talent that Rotterdam festival audiences got to see on Friday was Flying Fish from Sri Lanka. Director Sanjee Pushpakumara, present at the screening, was clearly overwhelmed. He himself was seeing his film on the big screen for the first time, and then also in front of a sold-out audience.
His acceptance speech was not only touching but also remarkable. He thanked, of course, the staff and his mother, who had cooked for the largely unpaid cast and crew of this low-budget production supported by the Hubert Bals Fund, but also all the residents of Sri Lanka who had made his film education possible by paying taxes. Perhaps an idea for our arts actions?
He further revealed that Bergman and Tarkovsky were his great heroes and that he loved poetry, painting and theatre in addition to film. The latter was certainly reflected in this austere, yet at times grand-looking debut that had finally been realised after ten years of writing and dreaming. A bite-sized chunk it was not. Shot in relatively fragmentary scenes and images, this impression of life in Sri Lanka during the war with the Tamil Tigers requires some perseverance and even then much remains elusive. Only after quite some time do you discover the storylines hidden in this loose mosaic. Besides, the symbolism is probably more important than it initially appears.
Apart from a series of short films and Rutger Hauer's performance as the painter Pieter Breughel in the Polish-Swedish The Mill and the Cross the Dutch share at this festival is relatively small. In part, this is due to the fact that the films may not have previously been shown at another Dutch festival. Brownian Movement by Nanouk Leopold would have been perfectly in place here, but then again it goes to Berlin.
Dutch honours were thus observed these first festival days by the combination programme tucked away Our newspaper by Eline Flipse, and Club Zeus, the new film by David Verbeek. Our newspaper is a modest but beautifully and carefully made documentary about a Russian journalist who started an independent regional newspaper in the countryside far from Moscow, which is quite unique in Putin's Russia. IKON will broadcast the film next Thursday on Netherlands 2.
Club Zeus was, given Verbeek's reputation with Shanghai Trance and R U There has built up, a disappointment. The subject matter is intriguing enough: young, male 'hosts' giving paid attention to lonely women. Unfortunately, the rather drawn-out elaboration barely rose above the beautifully photographed cliché of loneliness in a metropolis. Let's hope it was a snack made too quickly.
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