Leo Bankersen has been writing about film since Chinatown and Night of the Living Dead. Reviewed as a freelance film journalist for the GPD for a long time. Is now, among other things, one of the regular contributors to De Filmkrant. Likes to break a lance for children's films, documentaries and films from non-Western countries. Other specialities: digital issues and film education.
Compared to previous editions, you could almost call the choice of opening film that kicks off the Rotterdam Film Festival tonight almost un-Rotterdamian. No wild young debut, exotic Asian or artistic crossover this time. The French book adaptation 38 Témoins, which has its world premiere in Rotterdam tonight, is the seventh feature by Walloon actor/director Lucas Belvaux and has already been acquired...
IDFA's jury neatly balanced poetry and politics by awarding among the feature-length documentaries the moving Planet of Snail (South Korea), alongside the Palestinian village-set 5 Broken Cameras, a Palestinian/Israeli/French/Dutch co-production. Planet of Snail by Seung-Jun Yi received the main award, the VPRO IDFA Award for best feature-length documentary. The fireworks of...
A bit alienating it is. Watching at IDFA the eventful account of Egypt's February Tahrir 2011 revolution while at the same time, in Tahrir Square, the second phase of resistance against the dictatorship is in full swing. A kind of 'back to the future' feeling. Tahrir 2011 is a relatively unpolished, but with a sense of urgency in...
Coincidence? The two Dutch documentaries in the main competition of the IDFA documentary festival both explore what music can mean to people. Two films that also complement each other perfectly - one starts from the perspective of the listener, the other from the musician. In About Canto, Ramon Gieling outlines the profound influence that Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato...
The crisis rages on and the Arab world is in flux, but in the documentary world, the time for big stories is over. At least that was the conclusion drawn by festival director Ally Derks at a press conference ahead of the 24th edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (16-27 November). Unlike a decade ago, documentary filmmakers now focus...
It is not very often that Dutch films attract the attention of the film trade magazine Screen International. Now that the web edition ScreenDaily happens to publish two reviews in a row, it is nice to quote something from them. Screen editor-in-chief Mike Goodridge saw Dutch Oscar contender Sonny Boy and Marco van Geffen's debut film Onder ons (international title Among Us) and came to the...
The Netherlands Film Festival is only halfway through, but let's list three notable premieres anyway. Three films that may not be big crowd pleasers, but three uncompromising auteur films that bear witness to a vision that goes beyond entertaining storytelling. Three films that have also received attention abroad...
The Tuschinski Award for best graduation film of the Film Academy was awarded this afternoon at the Dutch Film Festival to Anne-Marieke Graafmans for her documentary If I didn't have you. What is special about the presentation of this award for up-and-coming talent is that the commercial cinema business and independent film criticism are here together for a while. The Tuschinski Award will be presented and with 5000 euro...
Will classic cinema survive the digital iconoclasm of the future? The question is not new, but it comes to mind again upon seeing the programme of the Netherlands Film Festival, which opens tonight with André van Duren's De bende van Oss. Put that opening film next to Iconoclasm, the festival's main theme, and you see what...
YXIE has been shot down. It may not be big national news, but it is yet another of those many harrowing examples that show how bleak the wind is blowing through the cultural landscape. YXIE, the word comes from the quiver of poet-painter Lucebert, one of the artists of the COBRA movement. It was also to become the name of a...
Cover of Spalding Gray At the Holland Festival, two minds wander. The loudest is that of Christoph Schlingensief, Germany's most independent filmmaker, theatre-maker, activist and enfant terrible, always good for controversy. After being diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008, he processed his anger and fear in Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir, presented in 2009 at...
In 1945, advanced rocket technology allowed a group of Nazis to escape to the moon. There they hid and soon they will return to take over again. At Imagine, Amsterdam's festival for fantastic film, there was a sneak preview of that. If the omens do not deceive, Iron Sky, as this Finnish production is called, promises to be a...
Rutger Hauer must be a happy man, and not just because he is receiving a career award tonight on the opening night of the 27th Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival Imagine. Once drawn to America more or less on good luck, now one of the few Dutch film actors with a broad and still expanding and insanely varied international career. Blonde robot in Blade...
The festival for short film Go Short in Nijmegen is not quite over yet, but last night the winners of the various competitions were announced at the Award Show in LUX. The award for best short fiction went to Incident by a Bank by Swedish director Ruben Östlund. He took a failed 2006 bank robbery as the starting point for...
To protest against the cuts in culture, you can of course shout loudly, but as an artist you can also just do what you are good at - make something really beautiful. Dutch film director Danyael Sugawara (Alles stroomt) opted for the latter and in a day and a half he and the best Dutch actors shot Na U, a small drama about unconditional love and...
Of course, not every award needs to be high-profile, but still... Four Oscars (best film, director, actor, screenplay) for the already lavishly praised stutter drama in other places The King's Speech, would anyone there
With a last-minute added screening of the Egyptian drama 678, which caused quite a stir in Cairo in December, Rotterdam was still able to catch up a little on Egyptian current events. 678 dispenses with the myth that Egyptian women can protect themselves from handsome men by wearing a headscarf. In the loosely fact-based...
Those who did not attend the first cinema screening of Tiger Eyes yesterday would do well to tune in to Nederland 2 on Tuesday night. That is the television premiere of this Frank Scheffer-directed anniversary film with which the Rotterdam Film Festival celebrates its fortieth edition. In Tiger Eyes, seven directors who together represent the kind of cinema that Rotterdam strongly...
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 in front of a sold-out audience. His acceptance speech was not only touching but...
There are great skateboarding scenes in the Greek Wasted Youth with which the Rotterdam Film Festival opened its 40th edition tonight. Lyrical, but with that hearty dose of raw nervousness that suits this attempt to capture the sense of life of a city or perhaps an entire country in crisis. Wasted Youth, selected for the Tiger Competition for budding filmmakers, is the ostensible...
Avatar was the best-attended film in 2010, with over 1.2 million visitors. In fifth place is New Kids: Turbo, the Dutch surprise hit. A total of 28.1 million cinema tickets were sold last year, the highest number ever in the past 30 years. The breakthrough of 3D plays an important role in this. 1 in...
According to the Dutch film press, the French prison drama Un Prophète and the Pixar animated film Toy Story 3 were the best films shown in Dutch cinemas this year. Dutch winner is Hanro Smitsman's grim teen drama Schemer, the Kring van Nederlandse Filmjournalisten announced. This result is the result of a survey of 54 film journalists who each...
Leonard Retel Helmrich's Stand of the Stars is a two-time winner of the Amsterdam documentary festival IDFA. At the awards ceremony at the Tuschinski theatre, it was announced that this dynamic and poetic portrait of a poor Indonesian family not only won the VPRO IDFA Award for best feature-length documentary, but was also chosen (by another jury) as the best of the...
Timothy Leary is not dead. The corpse of this colourful 1960s counterculture guru may have abandoned its occupant on 31 May 1996, but Leary's ash particles are orbiting the earth, his spiritual legacy is preserved on the internet and, if the rumour is true, a tape recording of him travels to...
The latest in documentary screening has nothing to do with websites or other new media. On the contrary, the presentation of the 'live documentary' Utopia in Four Movements, which IDFA had the European premiere of, in fact harks back to the primal form of cinema, when films were shown with live music and a so-called explicateur. Those...
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