The 2016 Autumn Consultation. This annual evening of debate around burning issues in the film industry revealed above all that the industry is far from being on the same page.
A major retrospective of the work of Fernando Botero (1932) is on show at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, entitled Botero: Celebrate Life! The rush of opening such an exhibition takes energy out of him, but strangely enough painting never exhausts him, he says in his studio in Monaco. 'I have never experienced anything more fulfilling than painting or sculpting. Painting takes you out of everyday reality. You forget your body - even your existence. It's intense, but while painting I don't feel any fatigue, even after working for seven or eight hours. Whereas at a cocktail party I'm exhausted after only half an hour.'
Sexual abuse, alienation and the emptiness of existence are the ingredients of Motel Mist by Thai debutant Prabda Yoon. A #IFFR Tiger Award worthy film. In tightly directed storylines, Yoon gently critiques Thailand's social and political climate. For instance, Motel Mist refers to the well-known paedophile sex tourism. Moreover, Yoon makes an attempt to capture the emptiness and alienation...
Festival director Bero Beyer found it difficult to choose eight films to nominate for the Hivos Tiger Award. After all, what makes a film special? According to Beyer, Elisabeth Subrin's film drama A Woman, a Part evokes a sense of nostalgia and is also outspoken, bold and above all human. The #IFFR check by Culture Press is that A Woman, a...
With the revamped, more compact Tiger competition, IFFR aims to show what the festival stands for. Nurturing new talent with a voice of its own. Is the Tiger roaring again?
Can a robot understand our feelings? Can we know others. Japanese drama Sayonara and American stop-motion animation Anomalisa have an unexpected common ground.
Who does a film belong to? That's the theme at this year's IFFR Critics' Choice programme. From YouTube compilations to a Russian Mad Men. Is the studio the owner, the filmmaker or the viewer? With video essays as the new form of film criticism.
The Rotterdam Tiger Competition selected films by newcomers with a distinctive voice of their own. History's Future by Fiona Tan is a philosophical essay bursting with imagination.
45th Film Festival Rotterdam, the first under new director Bero Beyer, gets off to a strong start with Beyond Sleep, after W.F. Hermans's Nooit meer slapen.
Bero Beyer, the new director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, announces initial plans for edition 2016.
If all goes well, the 56th Thessaloniki International Film Festival will kick off on 6 November. Less well-known than Rotterdam, Berlin or Locarno, but the most important festival in southern Europe. And they have quirky and broad programming, where you can discover all kinds of new filmmakers. But is it going well? The first festival dated back to 1960 and was...
I am an idealist, said Bero Beyer, the new director of the Rotterdam Film Festival at the Spring Consultation.
We write day 6 of the IFFR and take an intermediate view. In the deluge of films, the short films (1 to 60 minutes) always fall away a little in attention. This is a shame, because there is a lot to discover within this format. We list for you. 1 - The IFFR is the festival with one of the...
Film and film criticism. Image versus the word. But what happens when the critic starts using visual language too? Well, something like this, for example: Transformers: The Premake, by Kevin B. Lee. Romance or amour fou It seems so obvious in today's digital online world. Is the video essay an answer to the crisis, perceived or otherwise, in art criticism? Film critics...
Today, the International Film Festival Rotterdam announced that director Rutger Wolfson is handing over the baton after the 2015 edition. About his decision, Wolfson says in the press release: "Eight years is a long time to lead an important film festival and with the 44th edition, which will be very strong, I have achieved everything I wanted to achieve. Together with my family, I have...
Scene 1 - Expectations The main hall of film theatre 't Hoogt was filled with people from the film sector on Wednesday afternoon at the invitation of the Film Fund. The subject of the meeting is the chronically low attendance of more artistic Dutch films. This has been the case for a long time, by the way, and not only in the Netherlands. Should new avenues be explored? Should expectations be...
It was ball in Rotterdam on Thursday, 30 January. At the Municipal Culture Congress, a few hundred officials, local politicians and arts organisations gathered to talk about where they could help each other. It was supposed to be a positive day. There had been long enough complaining and arguing: look ahead, hopeful into the future. Even if the worst is yet to come.
9,000 euros was the amount with which Indian director Anup Singh's Qissa got off the ground a decade ago. That money came from the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) affiliated Hubert Bals Fund (HBF), which has been supporting filmmakers in developing countries for 25 years now. Last night, Qissa opened the 43rd edition of the Rotterdam festival. This makes the port city
world capital for independent film for ten days, as business director Janneke Starink stated at the opening in the Doelen.
Fifteen years after Peter Delpeuts Felice, Felice the International Film Festival Rotterdam gets another Dutch opening. The 42nd edition of this leading event will kick off on 23 January with the world premiere of The resurrection of an asshole by Guido van Driel, festival director Rutger Wolfson announced this afternoon.
Smiling, she lets a boy film her with his mobile phone and she happily wriggles into lascivious curves in the process. But when he really wants to see her breasts she flinches. Yet later she will go much, much further and she gets staggeringly little in return. Jasna, the rebellious protagonist from Cliff (Clip), is a Serbian teen...
That Martin Scorsese's mesmerising Hugo was number one in the audience rating for a while at the Rotterdam festival is not so surprising. What is surprising, however, is the film that emerged as number two yesterday and has now ousted Hugo from first place: the documentary Back to the Square in which filmmaker Petr Lom looks at how things stand in Egypt after the...
Last night, Rotterdam festival-goers in Pathé's Hall 4 witnessed a small miracle. Some film fragments from 1906 by the legendary Georges Méliès were now shown in stereoscopic 3D for the first time. So that you could, as it were, imagine yourself present on the set of this French pioneer who was the first to understand that cinema is not there...
OK. A pilot. When Jeroen Stout lost his Wednesday film fork in Radio Kunststof on Radio 1 in December 2010, we made him an offer he could easily refuse: to do something like that with us. But that we would then look for a way that suits The Dodo. After all, audio online may be the...
The International Film Festival Rotterdam celebrates its fortieth edition with a fitting XL programme. That Roman numeral XL not only indicates respectable age. It also says something about size: this fortieth also bursts with the intiguing programme, with screenings at no less than forty locations throughout the inner city of Rotterdam. Inside the festival walls is...
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...
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