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...
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...
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...
Fransz Litszt, born in 1811, explored every nook and cranny of the piano in his work, trying to incorporate every conceivable technique. As this contemporary of Carl Czerny, Niccolo Paganini and Richard Wagner was born 200 years ago this year, so there is a Liszt year. The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra bit the bullet of that on Friday 28 January,...
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...
Between 21 and 30 January 2011, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Rotterdam will host the Flamenco Biennial, a music and dance fest around that mythical Spanish primal music that leaves no one untouched. A style of music, moreover, that developed in parallel with the history of the Iberian peninsula, where the culture of the Indian Roma gypsies came together with that of the...
Of course, we sometimes miss one. And of course Caro Emerald is cool and Graffity 6 is new. But there is more culture in the Netherlands than many users of mainstream media realise. Deep into the 1980s, sports halls were already full for Rai musicians, and that was years before Cheb Khaled penetrated the charts with Aïsha. The Cape Verdean community in Rotterdam...
Country houses will surround it, but in the middle there will be something completely different: a real "sculptural dwelling" by Atelier van Lieshout. With a price tag of a million euros, the house is not a cheap work of art either, but then you have something that the whole world comes to see. Less original than his recently erected one in Rotterdam...
The margins are not huge, but the Van Gogh Museum's attendance figures have been falling for a few years now. In peak year 2006, 1,677,268 visitors still walked through the vistas; in 2010, there are likely to be only 1,432,000. The Rijksmuseum, which remains open despite its renovation, is also still far below the figures of peak year, with an expected 900,000 visitors....
Rotterdam - That every disadvantage 'hep' its advantage is often apparent with symphony orchestras. A principal conductor, for instance, is usually in charge of his own orchestra for no more than about 12 weeks a year. He divides the rest of his time among the other orchestras he is also already chief of. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, for instance, is now not only principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic...
Among lovers of the music of contemporaries Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and George Frederic Handel (1685-1759), the bickering is well comparable to that between supporters of Beatles and Rolling Stones. Bach is classical, Handel populist, Bach wrote lofty music, Handel flat-out , Bach was (barring his St Matthew Passion) succinct in his musical statements, Handel rambled on endlessly. And so...
Beppe Costa. Who doesn't know him. And who wouldn't go to a show he plays in without thinking for a minute? After all, the little Italian musical jack-of-all-trades is capable of winning hearts with his music. And with his presence. Well. Director Alize Zandwijk must have thought: we're going to change that image completely this autumn,...
GDMW festival comes from the tube of the only literary magazine still doing a bit in the Netherlands: Passionate Magazine. A bit contrary, youthful but not juvenile and with an open eye to the many cultures in the city where it was founded: Rotterdam. The festival is a happy combo of literary content, happy poets, embarrassing displays and beer,...
Incandescent bulbs are also out of the question in theatres. Plays, musicals and concerts will soon all have to switch to "sustainable" lighting. And, just as this affects the atmosphere in the living room, it also affects the atmosphere on stage: sustainable light has completely different colour values than old-fashioned light. Lighting designers have been complaining about this for some time. But how...
Ok, a few people might have been a tad disappointed. Who had hoped that Rotterdam's theatre would reopen with real bang, after the extremely successful upgrade of the interior by scrap artist Jan Versweyveld (suspended ceiling, marble and carpet on the stairs). But that, of course, cannot happen. After all, the Rotterdam Schouwburg only does bangers when International Choice boss Annemie Vanackere is there...
The teachers recite it, a whistle sounds. The audience mimics it, like wax in the hands of the five Chinese on stage. Anyone who walks into the performance C'est du Chinois walks into a Mandarin language lesson. An effective language lesson besides, you understand the two small families-they have only been in the country for four months but plan to...
'So, Dr Lacan, are women more susceptible to madness? ... Is the man susceptible to hysteria?' In 'Deserve', part of Jorge León and Simone Aughterlony's triptych about the maid, the makers dig deep, very deep. They follow the intriguing line of the great debunkers in our history of thought: from Hegel's master-slave analysis through Marx and Freud to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Core of...
This year's debate season in Rotterdam opened in the renovated hall of De Unie. The newly completed space has a pleasant and intimate feel. All the more remarkable the statement by discussion leader Natasja van den Berg that questions from the floor are not allowed "because they are not about anything anyway". That doesn't exactly sound like a warm welcome in a debate centre. Admittedly, it did deliver...
Things happen in places like this that cannot bear the light of day. We are deep in Rotterdam's container port, among the neon-lit transhipment yards and dark warehouses. In one of those raw warehouses are two truck trailers. One is set up as an illegal sewing workshop, the other is filled with earth and rubber tyres. They form the backdrop for Hungarian theatre-maker Kornél Mundruczó's performance 'Hard to be a god'.
The show tells the fairly inimitable story of Karoly, who wants to make symbolic torture porn to blackmail his father with it. That father once raped his sister and is now an MEP. Three women are lured to this sewing studio under false pretences to participate in those videos. Things do not end well for them, partly because the foreign film director has rather sadistic tendencies, damaging the ladies to the point of rendering them useless.
Over the next few days, the show Der perfekte Tag - Ruhrtrilogie Teil 3 by German director René Pollesch was due to play at De Internationale Keuze in Rotterdam. But unfortunately, the main actor, Fabian Hinrichs, broke his leg and the performance had to be cancelled. What are we missing now? In recent years, I saw a number of performances by René in Berlin...
She has 14 first names because her father liked to name his whole family and she was an only child. She is an in-demand actress, but Gonny Gaakeer has also been a girl with a grandmother. A beautiful grandmother, who in the last years of her 95-year-old life fell over more and more often and bore the ugly wounds of it. Gonny tells her story, and...
Anyone walking into the venue where choreographer/visual artist Piet Rogie's performance 'Stardust' is due to take place is immediately astonished. In the vacant exhibition hall of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, ropes are stretched, it is teeming with seemingly carelessly scattered props and four cement mixers stand along the side like implacable sentinels. The whole space radiates that things are getting exciting. And the viewer is not disappointed with that.
Snow has fallen, a thick layer of fresh snow. Fake snow admittedly, but real enough to imagine yourself in the middle of Russia. There, in the city of Sverdlovsk, or Yekaterinburg, once lived the man about whom the show 'Poets and bandits' is about. Boris Ryzhy (1974-2001) turned the raw realities of his hometown into poems. He left more than a thousand poems to the world. His breakthrough came at the Poetry International festival in Rotterdam, in the year 2000. A year later, he was dead. Boris Ryzhy, 26, had hanged himself.
Theatre group De Warme Winkel makes that link with Rotterdam if only because 'Poëten en bandieten' is played there. An old factory hall serves as a backdrop for the run-down working-class neighbourhood in which Ryzhy grew up. From behind a work table, actress Mara van Vlijmen calls Rotterdam residents. None of them are at home. But on their answering machine is now one of Ryzhy's poems, which must be a wondrous experience for the listeners. The Warm Shop does not show how the professor's son Boris ended up in that poor neighbourhood. Whereas he himself talks about an environment full of drab flats in his poems, the stage setting is more reminiscent of the outdoors, with all that vast snow. The atmosphere is cosy and warm. On a float decorated with candles, a folk ensemble comes on, singing Russian songs. Old-fashioned songs, and nothing pop or punk.
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