Rotterdam Film Festival

Geoff Andrew reports from Rotterdam with the best of this year‘s festival

For a while this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival seemed a dodgy prospect, with a director chosen to replace the long-serving Sandra den Hamer late in the day. But it was business as usual, with the programme providing a broad, rewarding filmic feast to savour.

As always there were stinkers – the Ukrainian ‘Las Meninas’, the French-Haitian ‘Eat, For This Is My Body’, the Korean ‘Hello, Stranger’, the Italian ‘L’Ora di Punta’. Disappointments, as well: ‘political’ message-movies like the Danish ‘Go with Peace, Jamil’ (about murderous tensions within a European city’s Arab community) and Argentina’s ‘Lamb of God’ (about the legacy of the dictatorship) were too constrained by genre cliché to convince, while at the other, more wayward, end of the spectrum Abolfazl Jalili’s ‘Hafez’, a fable inspired by the Persian poet, is a pale shadow of the Iranian’s finest work.

Decline, however, is not a word that springs to mind in the case of several veterans. I sang the praises of Ermanno Olmi’s ‘One Hundred Nails’ when it played the LFF, and Eric Rohmer’s eccentric, even perverse, ‘The Romance of Astrée and Céladon’ is a work of great charm and intelligence. But George A Romero’s ‘Diary of the Dead’ is also wise and witty, finding him still, in the fifth of his zombie movies, drawing fresh blood while leaving ample meat to chew on. Suffice to say it speaks volumes about a world devoted to the consumption of… the moving image.

As if to prove Romero’s point, some films from younger directors displayed impressive visual talent – Chile’s ‘The Sky, the Land and the Rain’, Belgium’s ‘Small Gods’ – but were too derivative and indulgent. From France, Cédric Anger’s ‘The Killer’ was fairly ingenious film noir while Delphine Kreuter’s ‘57000 Km Between Us’ has intriguing things to say about life in the webcam age. But by far the best first feature I saw by a European was ‘The King of Ping Pong’. Jens Jonsson has attracted attention with his shorts, but this wry, tender tale of two very different teenage brothers living with their divorcee mum in wintry Sweden shows real cinematic assurance. A strong contender for UK distribution.

Asia fared typically well. Rithy Panh’s documentary ‘Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers’, about prostitutes in Phnom-Penh, is bleak but powerful, while Aditya Assarat’s ‘Wonderful Town’, a low-key drama about the difficulty of rebuilding lives in coastal, post-tsunami Thailand, shows much promise. Likewise ‘Fujian Blue’, Weng Shou-Ming’s incisive account of life in today’s Fuqing, a Chinese city where crime is common. Also recommended is Shingo Wakagi’s ‘Waltz in Starlight’, an uneven but funny and touching tribute to the director’s late grandfather.

My favourite was unquestionably ‘In the City of Sylvia’, by José Luis Guerín. Experimental but accessible, its slight narrative centres on a young artist and flâneur who sees and follows a woman – his ideal, perhaps – he thinks he once met years ago. But neither the countless lovelies the impossibly handsome protagonist observes nor the journeys he undertakes are the real focal point of this Catalan gem set, well, in your dreams. It’s a profoundly imaginative, ironically witty and illuminating film about the gaze and point of view – the artist’s, his subjects’, the camera’s, ours. Lightly evocative of Velázquez, Manet, Goethe, Dante, Kiarostami, Tati and Hitchcock, among others, it’s a subtle, seductive beauty.

---